Reviews of People of the Book by G Brooks
All the World's a Folio
When Hanna Heath, a manuscript conservator, kickoff touches the centuries-old Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, she feels a "strange and powerful" sensation, something "between brushing a alive wire and stroking the back of a newborn baby's head." The manuscript is small, the binding soiled and scuffed, but its lavish illuminations — miniature scenes "every bit interpreted in the Midrash," created "at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments" — are stunning. Information technology's the spring of 1996 in Sarajevo, and Hanna has been called in to examine the book before information technology's put on display.
To sympathise the piece of work of the craftsmen who created the medieval texts she restores, Hanna has made her own gilded foliage and created white pigment past covering pb bars with the dregs of quondam wine and animal dung. She's familiar with "the intense ruby-red known every bit worm scarlet ... extracted from tree-abode insects" and the blue, "intense as a midsummer heaven, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli." Looking closely at the parchment of the Haggadah, she can tell information technology comes from "the peel of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep." These lush details, at once celebratory and elegiac, will appeal to the sort of reader who picks up a book merely for the feel of information technology.
Hanna is opposed to "chemical cleanups" and "heavy restorations," believing that impairment and wear reveal much about how and where a manuscript has been used. "To restore a volume to the way information technology was when it was made is to lack respect for its history," she tells Ozren Karaman, the Muslim librarian who risked his life to save the Haggadah while Sarajevo was being shelled. During her examination of the manuscript, Hanna finds a fragment of an insect'south wing and a small white hair, which she slips into glassine envelopes for later analysis. These clues and other oddities — where are the book'southward clasps? — are the springboard for Geraldine Brooks's panoramic third novel, "People of the Book."
Brooks, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her previous novel, "March," has fatigued her inspiration from the real Sarajevo Haggadah. As she explains in an afterword, little is known most this book, except that it has been saved from destruction on at to the lowest degree three occasions: twice by Muslims and in one case by a Roman Catholic priest. Building on these fragments of information, Brooks has created a fictional history that moves to Sarajevo in 1940, then dorsum to tardily-19th-century Vienna, 15th-century Venice, Catalonia during the Castilian Inquisition and finally Seville in 1480, the new home of the artist responsible for the Haggadah's illuminations.
The history of this holy book is a bloody 1, spring with brutality and humiliation. Families who protect it are torn autonomously; the book itself is plundered to pay for a questionable medical cure, then lost in a game of hazard. A particularly agonizing scene occurs during the Inquisition in a grotesquely named "place of relaxation" where those accused of heresy by the Spanish authorities are tortured.
Brooks'due south extensive research is evident throughout, but she occasionally chokes her storytelling with historical particular; her dialogue can also be heavy with exposition. The narrative works best when the burden of the past is borne more lightly, when Brooks burrows into her characters' inner lives. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, for example, a syphilitic bookbinder, overcome by symptoms of dementia, forgets how to make tea or even pursue his craft. Terrified, he experiences his thoughts as "an army in retreat, ceding ever more territory to his enemy, the disease."
An inscription in the existent Sarajevo Haggadah reads Revisto per mi. Gio. Domenico Vistorini, 1609. Taken with the notion that a Catholic priest surveying the codex during the Inquisition might choose to save it, Brooks creates another memorable character, an erudite scholar with "an innate reverence for books." Sometimes, he finds, "the dazzler of the Saracens' fluid calligraphy moved him. Other times, it was the elegant statement of a learned Jew that gave him pause." This priest haunts the sacristy for draughts of unconsecrated communion wine, intent on obliterating painful memories from his childhood — "the blowing sand of that desolate town," the secret niche within a carved Madonna — not to mention thoughts of all the texts he has sent to the fires in his 17 years as a censor.
In the intimate first-person narration of the convict creative person who creates the book's original illuminations, a longing for freedom — a theme echoed throughout the Haggadah's account of the liberation of the Jews — is eloquently evoked. Imagining a walk to the declension, holding an enchanted staff, the creative person believes that "the great body of water would part, and I would cross it, and make my fashion, in slow stages, downwards all the dusty roads that lead toward home."
These self-contained historical interludes shelter within the overarching and at times problematic story of Hanna Heath. An irreverent Aussie, she's an appealing grapheme, but as she travels to Vienna, Boston and London, coming together with experts who might help reply her questions about the Haggadah, the structure of the narrative works confronting her. A chapter that ends with Hanna wondering about the insect wing or the stain will be followed past a historical interlude solving that piece of the puzzle. Not only anticipated, this back-and-forth scheme also creates a discrepancy: the reader learns far more Hanna always will.
Woven into the puzzle-solving is the account of Hanna'due south romance with the Muslim librarian who has saved the book, as well as glimpses of her disastrous and at times melodramatic relationship with her mother. ("How is your latest tatty footling book, anyway? Fixed all the dog-eared pages?") Readers will eventually acquire why Dr. Heath, an eminent neurosurgeon, is so dismissive, but this part of the plot has an artificial feel.
We are left wishing Brooks had constitute a less obtrusive style to gather up the many strands of her narrative. While peering through a microscope at a rime of salt crystals on the manuscript of the Haggadah, Hanna reflects that "the aureate beaters, the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders" are "the people I experience most comfortable with. Sometimes in the placidity these people speak to me." Though the reader's sense of Hanna'due south human relationship with the Haggadah rarely deepens to such a level, Geraldine Brooks's certainly has.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/books/review/Fugard-t.html
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