From Publishers Weekly Reading Geraldine
Brooks's remarkable debut novel, Year of Wonders, or more recently
March, which won the Pulitzer Prize, it would be easy to forget that
she grew up in Australia and worked as a journalist. Now in her
dazzling new novel, People of the Book, Brooks allows both her native
land and current events to play a larger role while still continuing to
mine the historical material that speaks so ardently to her
imagination. Late one night in the city of Sydney, Hanna Heath, a rare
book conservator, gets a phone call. The Sarajevo Haggadah, which
disappeared during the siege in 1992, has been found, and Hanna has
been invited by the U.N. to report on its condition. Missing documents
and art works (as Dan Brown and Lev Grossman, among others, have
demonstrated) are endlessly appealing, and from this inviting premise
Brooks spins her story in two directions. In the present, we follow the
resolutely independent Hanna through her thrilling first encounter with
the beautifully illustrated codex and her discovery of the tiny signs-a
white hair, an insect wing, missing clasps, a drop of salt, a wine
stain-that will help her to discover its provenance. Along with the
book she also meets its savior, a Muslim librarian named Karaman. Their
romance offers both predictable pleasures and genuine surprises, as
does the other main relationship in Hanna's life: her fraught
connection with her mother. In the other strand of the narrative we
learn, moving backward through time, how the codex came to be lost and
found, and made. From the opening section, set in Sarajevo in 1940, to
the final section, set in Seville in 1480, these narratives show Brooks
writing at her very best. With equal authority she depicts the
struggles of a young girl to escape the Nazis, a duel of wits between
an inquisitor and a rabbi living in the Venice ghetto, and a girl's
passionate relationship with her mistress in a harem. Like the
illustrations in the Haggadah, each of these sections transports the
reader to a fully realized, vividly peopled world. And each gives a
glimpse of both the long history of anti-Semitism and of the struggle
of women toward the independence that Hanna, despite her mother's
lectures, tends to take for granted. Brooks is too good a novelist to
belabor her political messages, but her depiction of the Haggadah
bringing together Jews, Christians and Muslims could not be more
timely. Her gift for storytelling, happily, is timeless. Copyright 2007
Publishers Weekly.
From The New YorkerWhen an Australian rare-book conservator named Hanna Heath finds a
butterfly wing, a salt crystal, a white hair, and bloodstains in the
recently rediscovered Sarajevo Haggadah, a late-medieval illuminated
codex of uncertain provenance, she sets out to solve the mystery of the
book’s origins. To her disappointment, analysis of the specimens
reveals little. "It’s too bad," an organic chemist tells her. "Blood is
potentially so dramatic." Brooks, beginning where science leaves off,
uses Hanna’s finds as entry points to richly imagined historical
landscapes peopled by the Haggadah’s creators, protectors, and would-be
destroyers—a female Muslim slave in Convivencia Spain, a Jewish doctor
in fin-de-siècle Vienna, an alcoholic priest in seventeenth-century
Venice. Their narratives alternate with Hanna’s own, and the final,
multilayered effect is complex and moving.
Copyright © 2008
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Why
is it, in this day of rampant technological change, that readers
continue to be fascinated by stories of dusty manuscripts moldering on
rickety shelves? Think of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, in which
a monk investigates charges of heresy by prowling through documents in
a medieval library. Or The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin
Thomason, in which four Princeton students find puzzles aplenty in a
15th-century manuscript. Or even those big blockbuster bestsellers —
Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (ancient arcana of numerous varieties)
and James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy (ancient Peruvian
manuscript).
Now, in a similar vein, we have Geraldine Brooks’s
People of the Book. The good news is that this new novel by the author
of March, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006, is
intelligent, thoughtful, gracefully written and original. Brooks has
built upon her experience as a correspondent in Bosnia for the Wall
Street Journal to construct a story around a book — small, rare and
very old — and the people into whose hands it had fallen over five
centuries, people who "had known unbearable stress: pogrom,
Inquisition, exile, genocide, war."
The people are inventions,
but the book itself is very real: "The Sarajevo Haggadah, created in
medieval Spain, was a famous rarity, a lavishly illuminated Hebrew
manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was firmly against
illustrations of any kind. It was thought that the commandment in
Exodus 'Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness of
any thing' had suppressed figurative art by medieval Jews. When the
book came to light in Sarajevo in 1894, its pages of painted miniatures
had turned this idea on its head and caused art history texts to be
rewritten." Now it is 1996. The book has survived the wartime violence
in Bosnia because the head of the library at the National Museum in
Sarajevo, a Muslim, saved it from almost certain destruction by hiding
it "in a safe-deposit box in the vault of the central bank." Hanna
Heath, a 30-year-old Australian book conservator, has been called in by
the United Nations to inspect its conditions and repair it as necessary.
The
novel alternates between chapters narrated by Hanna and flashbacks to
various points in the book's history -- Sarajevo 1940, Vienna 1894,
Venice 1609, Tarragona 1492, Seville 1480 -- at which crucial details
about its making and subsequent long passage are revealed. Hanna, in
whom it's not difficult to detect a hint of the author's own past as a
determined, hard-digging reporter, is a quirky, no-nonsense woman whom
I find exceptionally easy to like. Mostly she's totally honest with
herself. She's "a complete pessimist. If there's a sniper somewhere in
the country I'm visiting, I fully expect to be the one in his
crosshairs," and a "world-class coward." She's "not ambitious in the
traditional sense," but "I just love to move the ball forward, even if
it's only a millimeter, in the great human quest to figure it all out."
Her work is an obscure specialty practiced by only a few people around
the world, but she loves it:
"My work has to do with objects,
not people. I like matter, fiber, the nature of the varied stuffs that
go to make a book. I know the flesh and fabrics of pages, the bright
earths and lethal toxins of ancient pigments. Wheat paste -- I can bore
the pants off anyone about wheat paste. . . . Of course, a book is more
than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and
hand. The gold beaters, the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders,
those are the people I feel most comfortable with. Sometimes, in the
quiet, these people speak to me. They let me see what their intentions
were, and it helps me do my work."
The book on the table before
her at the museum in Sarajevo may be small, but it contains many large
mysteries, or "a series of miracles." It is small, "convenient for use
at the Passover dinner table" in a Jewish family's residence, yet it is
"gorgeously illustrated" in bright, vivid, startling colors. Such
contents ordinarily would call for "an elaborate binding," but "this
book had probably been rebound many times in its long life" and a
century before, in Vienna, had been rebound "in simple cardboard covers
with an inappropriate Turkish printed floral decoration, now faded and
discolored."
Hanna works on the book for a week, at the end of
which "there probably weren't ten people in the world who could have
told for sure that I'd taken this book apart and put it back together."
Her work does not involve "chemical cleanups or heavy restorations," as
she tells Ozren Karaman, the librarian who had rescued the book: "I've
written too many papers knocking that approach. To restore a book to
the way it was when it was made is to lack respect for its history. I
think you have to accept a book as you receive it from past
generations, and to a certain extent damage and wear reflect that
history. The way I see it, my job is to make it stable enough to allow
safe handling and study, repairing only where absolutely necessary."
So
she does her job and leaves, but she isn't finished. For one thing,
this resolutely independent woman has taken something of a tumble for
Karaman, who is "clearly a spectacular human being, brave and
intelligent and all the rest of it," and handsome into the bargain. But
of more immediate concern, the U.N. plans to put the restored book on
public display in the library and wants her to write an essay for the
accompanying catalogue. She has extracted a few minuscule samples from
the book -- the wing of an insect, feathers and a rose, a wine-stained
fragment, a grain of salt, a white hair -- and considers them
sufficiently mysterious to warrant investigation.
Hanna herself
doesn't travel backward in time to discover where these bits and pieces
came from. She consults with other experts -- in her own field and
others -- and travels to Vienna, Boston and London in hopes of tracking
down the meaning of her tiny clues. But Brooks seizes on these
fragments to create five brief narratives in which they are
meticulously explained, allowing the people of the book to emerge from
the past to tell their stories. In Boston, Hanna talks about all this
with an old friend and former lover, an organic chemist, who listens
and then says:
"Well, from what you've told me, the book has
survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it.
You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in
the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous.
Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other' --
it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition,
Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists . . . same old, same old. It seems
to me the book, at this point, bears witness to all that."
Exactly.
People of the Book is about the appalling capacity we humans share for
turning against people who aren't the same as we are -- or at least
don't seem to be -- and doing them inexcusable, incomprehensible
violence. The survival of the Haggadah, Karaman says in a speech to the
Jewish community in Sarajevo, is "a symbol of the survival of
Sarajevo's multiethnic ideal," but it goes without saying that the
extreme violence in Bosnia and much of the rest of the Balkans in the
1990s was a mockery of that ideal and was far closer to the reality of
human history than the hopes and dreams of those who had handled the
book along the way to the library.
The stories of all those
people as invented by Brooks are interesting and revealing, but the
core of the book is Hanna's story. There's a lot more to it than fixing
the book and getting involved with Karaman. She is the only child of a
brilliant, driven and egotistical neurosurgeon who never married -- in
the 1960s in Australia, to have a child out of wedlock simply was not
done, but she did it -- and who was an inattentive mother who left the
rearing to the housekeeper. She was infuriated that Hanna chose to
become a book conservator rather than a high-powered medico like
herself, and her scorn for Hanna's work is palpable: "How is your
latest tatty little book, anyway? Fixed all the dog-eared pages?"
Though a crisis temporarily brings the two women together, the era of
good feelings doesn't last, and Brooks is too honest a student of human
nature to portray it otherwise. After all, as Hanna remembers Karaman
saying, "some stories just don't have happy endings."
As to the
ending of People of the Book, well, that's for you to find out. Suffice
it to say that it's a book that resides comfortably in a place we too
often imagine to be a no-man's land between popular fiction and
literature. Brooks tells a believable and engaging story about
sympathetic but imperfect characters -- "popular" fiction demands all
of that -- but she also does the business of literature, exploring
serious themes and writing about them in handsome prose. She appears to
be finding readers and admirers in growing numbers, and People of the
Book no doubt will increase those numbers.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
In the spirit of her previous books, Geraldine Brooks explores the
roots of cross-cultural convergence and divergence. Richly imagined but
based on fact, People of the Book covers
details from the most terrible times of religious intolerance, from the
Inquisition to the Nazis, while revealing an enduring humanity.
Interweaving Hanna’s story with flashbacks, Brooks builds drama and
suspense. While critics praised the compelling plot, many disagreed
about the narrative structure. Some thought that Brooks seamlessly tied
together the Haggadah’s and Hanna’s stories (including her romantic
entanglement), while others considered the young woman’s story too
contrived. Despite this tidy structure, the stories Brooks tells
"passionately affirm the enduring values of tolerance, compassion,
inclusion and diversity" (Chicago Tribune)—a lesson for the ages.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
The latest from Brooks will please her many fans. The story revolves
around a book—a Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, written
in medieval Europe. As 30-year-old Australian book restorer Hannah
Heath investigates the manuscript’s physical and textual features, the
story unfolds in flashbacks to reveal the book’s history and
the circumstances surrounding those who come in contact with it. Wren
narrates these disparate voices with deft rhythm and a lovely ebb and
flow, almost as if she were reading a mix of sacred text and chick lit.
Hannah’s voice is lilting, while others sound charming, inviting, and
suitably foreign, echoing the feel of the book. Wren wraps the story
around listeners’ ears, using changes in pitch, tempo, and accents
to help us get lost in the plot. An essential title for most audio
collections. --Neal Wyatt
Review
From 1480 Seville to 1996 Sarajevo, a
priceless scripture is chased by fanatics political and religious. Its
recovery makes for an enthralling historical mystery. In Sydney, ace
(and gorgeous) old-book conservator Hannah Heath gets a 2 a.m. phone
call. She's summoned to Sarajevo to check out a 15th-century
Spanish-made Haggadah, a codex gone missing in Bosnia during a 1992
siege. The document is a curiosity, its lavish illuminations appearing
to violate age-old religious injunctions against any kind of
illustration. Remarkably, it's Muslim museum librarian Ozren Karaman
who rescued the Hebrew artifact from furious shelling. Questioning (and
bedding) Ozren, Hannah examines the Haggadah binding and from clues
embedded there - an insect's wings, wine stains, white hair -
reconstructs the book's biography. And it's an epic. Chapter by
chapter, each almost an independent story, the chronicle unwinds - of
the book's changing hands from those of anti-Nazi partisans dreaming of
departing for Palestine from war-torn Croatia, from schemers in 1894
Vienna, home, despite Freud and Mahler, of virulent anti-Semitism.
Perhaps the best chapter takes place in 1609 Venice. There,
not-so-grand Inquisitor Domenico Vistorini, a heretic hunter with a
drinking problem, contends in theological disputation with brilliant
rabbinical star Judah Aryeh. The two strike up an unlikely alliance to
save the book, even while Vistorini at first blanches at its art - a
beautiful depiction of the glowing sun, prophesying, the hysterical
priest assumes, Galileo's heliocentric blasphemy. Tracing those
illustrations back to their origin point, Hannah unkinks a series of
fascinating conundrums - and learns, even more fiercely, to prize the
printed page.Rich suspense based on a true-life literary puzzle, from
the Pulitzer Prize - winning Brooks (March, 2005, etc.). (Kirkus
Reviews)
Review
“Less flash and more substance than The Da Vinci Code
. . . The stories of the Sarajevo Haggadah, both factual and fictional,
are stirring testaments to the people of many faiths who risked all to
save this priceless work.”
— USA Today
“As full of heart and curiosity as it is intelligence and judgment.”
—The Boston Globe
“Intelligent, thoughtful, gracefully written and original.”
—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
“Erudite but suspenseful . . . one of the most popular and successful works of fiction in the New Year.”
—Alan Cheuse, NPR / “All Things Considered”
Product Description
The “complex and moving”(The New Yorker) novel by Pulitzer Prize–winner Geraldine Brooks follows a rare manuscript through centuries of exile and war
Inspired by a true story, People of the Book
is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional
intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called “a tour de
force”by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious,
electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo
Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in
fifteenth-century S pain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian
rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny
artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment,
wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock its deep
mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art
forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics.
About the Author
Geraldine Brooks is the author of March, Year of Wonders, Nine Parts of Desire, and Foreign Correspondence. Previously, Brooks was a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She was born and raised in Australia.
From AudioFile
Narrator Edwina Wren is an Australian, as are this book's author and
its heroine, Hannah Heath. So that's a match. Hannah is flown to
war-torn Sarajevo to restore an ancient, priceless Haggadah. The sacred
manuscript has been sent like a cork down the bloody torrent of
history. The story's characters and accents vary widely, and Wren rises
magnificently to the challenge. The German officers don't just want the
manuscript, they ³vont² it. ³Let me see your chewish manuscripts . . .²
Wren's agile liquid voice is dipped in sugar. This too is a match,
since the survival of the text is proof of the heroic ecumenism of book
lovers. The opening inscription is from Henrich Heine: ³There, where
one burns books, one in the end burns men.² B.H.C. © AudioFile 2008,
Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
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