Rating: ****
Tags: Fiction, General, Religion, Historical, Judaism, Lang:en
Summary
Amazon.com Review
People of the Book will surely be hailed as one of the
best of 2008. --Mari Malcolm
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 Weekl