Book Review: People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

I usually don’t like poems about writing poems, or songs about writing songs. Barry Manilow may “Write the Songs,” but he doesn’t have to bore me with the details. And I am especially apprehensive about a book in which the main character is . . . a book!

But Geraldine Brooks, author of People of the Book, has a Pulitzer Prize to her credit -- for her novel March -- so if anyone could write a page-turner about turning pages, she is the person to do so. And she delivers the goods in this fascinating and well-paced account of the Sarajevo Haggadah.

The Sarajevo Haggadah is a real book, with a mysterious history. This 14th-century manuscript contains an account of the Passover, with illuminations in the style of Christian manuscripts – done at a time when illustrations were all but unknown in Jewish religious texts. The origins of this work remain unclear, but its survival presents other enigmas. How did this extraordinary object make its way from the Iberian peninsula to Sarajevo, and survive the destructive grasp of Inquisitors, Nazis and other book-burners and oppressors – not to mention more recent events, such as the siege of Sarajevo?

Brooks has some facts at her disposal, but her book relies mostly on her fertile imagination. Her story begins with the arrival in Sarajevo of Hanna Heath, a modern day expert in book conservation who is called from her home in Australia to prepare the Haggadah for presentation at a newly rebuilt museum. Moving back and forth from this contemporary vantage point, Brooks intermixes several extended flashbacks to earlier incidents in the history of this puzzling book, and depicts the series of chance events and heroic acts that led to the Haggadah’s survival over the centuries.

Hanna Heath is a brilliantly realized character, with lots of Aussie color thrown in for good measure. Here is her acerbic take on the English art scene: “The art world in England is an absolute magnet for the second sons of threadbare lords, or women named Annabelle Something-hyphen-Something who dress in black leggings and burnt orange cashmeres and smell faintly of wet Labrador. I always find myself lapsing into Paleolithic Strine when I’m around them, using words I’d never dream of using in real life, like cobber and bonza... Mum has always affected a kind of plummy, haut-Pom accent I associate with her snobbery. When I was little, she’d actually wince when I talked to her. ‘Really, Hanna, your vowels. They sound like a lorry has run over them.’”

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is editor of jazz.com, and also writes on books at Great Books Guide and The New Canon

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