Book Twenty-five: People of the Book

Book Twenty-five: People of the Book
Pages: 372
Finished: May 23

This novel, written by Geraldine Brooks, tells the story of a haggadah, a Jewish prayer book, and the various people whose lives have intersected it in some way. While the novel is inspired by a true story, our fictitious frame story is that of Hanna, the Australian rare book expert who is called in to restore the Sarajevo Haggadah. She collects evidence from the book itself, pictures, stains, the binding, the clasps, even a butterfly wing, and uses this evidence to piece together the forgotten history of this book's travels across Europe. Each clue is then given a voice in its own chapter that addresses what "really" happened that caused that stain or picture to appear. The narratives fit together seamlessly, and travel backwards: beginning with the most recent stories and traveling back to the time to when only the pictures had been made and the book was not even a book yet.
Hanna's story is interesting; she meets and has an affair with the man who rescued the haggadah during the bombing of Sarajevo, deals with a distant and unloving mother, uncovers mystery upon mystery, both about the novel and about herself.
I was reminded most often of The Red Violin, a movie that came out in 1999. The idea is similar, a frame story of an expert trying to uncover the truth about a priceless artifact, and not all is as it seems. The ending of the book is quite a bit different, but there is certainly that air of mystery that pervades the novel as well. Many of the stories are heartbreaking, and it is remarkable that the real Haggadah survived similar circumstances.
The most poignant part of the story, to me, is that the real book, just like in the novel, is rescued under dangerous conditions not by a Jew, but by a Muslim librarian, who snuck into the library at night during intense shelling to reclaim and hide the haggadah in a bank vault until the violence ends. It seems a miracle that the manuscript could survive so much, and tell the story of so many different people.

I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it. I wanted it to be a gripping narrative, even suspenseful. So I wrote and rewrote certain sections of historical background to use as seasoning between the discussion of technical issues. I tried to give a sense of the Convivencia, of poetry parties on summer nights ain beautiful formal gardens, of Arabic-speaking Jews mixing freely with Muslim and Christian neighbors. Although I couldn't know the story of the scribe or the illuminator, I tried to give a sense of each of them...I wanted to build up a certain tension around the dramatic, terrible reversals of the Inquisition and the expulsion. I wanted to convey fire and shipwreck and fear.

I am really looking forward to finding and reading other books by Geraldine Brooks, especially March, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel inspired by Little Women. Her prose is excellent and hard to put down. I can only hope that her other novels are as good.

Good Reading,
Caitlin