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Between the pages
Brooks' historical novel tells tales of the lives linked to ancient book
By Jenny Shank , Special to the Rocky
Friday, December 28, 2007
Success follows Geraldine Brooks, regardless of her style of writing.


Geraldine Brooks has enjoyed three successful phases of her writing career: first working as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in Bosnia and other war zones, then writing nonfiction books, including 1994's acclaimed Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, and most recently trying her hand at historical fiction.

She hasn't done so shabbily at it: She won the Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, March, an imagining of the life of Louisa May Alcott's father.

Brooks' resume would seem to make her uniquely qualified to tackle the complex subject matter of her new novel, People of the Book. The tale traces the history of one coveted tome, a Jewish prayer book traditionally used during the Passover seder, through time as it travels through war-torn Europe of many eras and influences the lives of the people who create or encounter it.

In April 1996, rare-book conservator Hanna Heath flies into Sarajevo to inspect and repair the Sarajevo Haggadah, which has just turned up after being lost during the war. "The Sarajevo Haggadah, created in medieval Spain," Brooks writes, "was a famous rarity, a lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was firmly against illustrations of any kind." In the afterword, Brooks notes that the novel is based on the true story of this Haggadah, though she has fictionalized her account, imagining the book's history.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2 ... the-pages/

'People of the Book': An erudite 'Da Vinci Code'

People of the Book
By Geraldine Brooks

By Susan Kelly, USA TODAY
Geraldine Brooks' novel People of the Book arrives with high expectations. Booksellers are comparing it to The Da Vinci Code and calling it the first literary hit of 2008.

Does Brooks deliver? Yes, and with less flash and more substance than Da Vinci. People of the Book is not as cinematic as Dan Brown's 2003 religious thriller, but Brooks is a skilled storyteller who also casts a spell of intrigue and evil in which demons feign divinity.

But her careful research and the novel's historic underpinnings make it highly unlikely People will face the criticism of factual flaws that dogged Da Vinci.

The titular book is a real one, the Sarajevo Haggadah. The richly illuminated Hebrew text, which recounts the story of Exodus, dates from medieval Spain. For more than 600 years, it was carried across borders and over seas to escape political and religious cataclysms.

The Haggadah came to rest in the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, and Brooks, who covered the war in Bosnia for The Wall Street Journal, imagines its perilous journey in her third novel.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Spain | Da Vinci | Hebrew | Sarajevo | Booksellers | Geraldine Brooks | Haggadah

Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for March, a retelling of Little Women from the perspective of the father who goes off to war. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, about a 17th-century village shrouded by plague, was acclaimed for bringing new luster to historical fiction.

The author says that though People of the Book has its roots in history, much of it is her own invention. Her chief creation is Hanna Heath, an Australian book conservator hired to restore the Haggadah after it survives the shelling of Sarajevo.

As the sardonic Aussie tends the manuscript, she finds klix artifacts — part of an insect's wing, a wine stain, salt crystals and a white hair. Believing they are keys to the book's mysterious past, Hanna takes samples to be analyzed.

Brooks alternates Hanna's account of her work and unraveling personal life with the story of those relics. The insect's wing takes us to Sarajevo at the dawn of World War II as the Nazis steal Jewish treasures.

The wine stain leads to Venice, 1609, where a tormented priest executes a papal order to burn most books written by Jews. The salt takes the story to 1492 and the Hebrew scribe who writes the text on the eve of the Jews' expulsion from Spain.

And finally, the hair harks back to Seville in 1480 and the unmasking of the artist. Hanna's own troubled past and uncertain future dovetail neatly with those of the book as both face betrayal from unexpected sources.

If Brooks becomes the new patron saint of booksellers, she deserves it. 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.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/revi ... book_N.htm

January 20, 2008
All the World’s a Page
By LISA FUGARD


PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

By Geraldine Brooks.


When Hanna Heath, a manuscript conservator, first touches the centuries-old Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, she feels a “strange and powerful” sensation, something “between brushing a live 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 “as interpreted in the Midrash,” created “at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments” — are stunning. It’s the spring of 1996 in Sarajevo, and Hanna has been called in to examine the book before it’s put on display.

To understand the work of the craftsmen who created the medieval texts she restores, Hanna has made her own gold leaf and created white pigment by covering lead bars with the dregs of old wine and animal dung. She’s familiar with “the intense red known as worm scarlet ... extracted from tree-dwelling insects” and the blue, “intense as a midsummer sky, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli.” Looking closely at the parchment of the Haggadah, she can tell it comes from “the skin 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 just for the feel of it.

Hanna is opposed to “chemical cleanups” and “heavy restorations,” believing that damage and wear reveal much about how and where a manuscript has been used. “To restore a book to the way it 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’s wing and a small white hair, which she slips into glassine envelopes for later analysis. These clues and other oddities — where are the book’s 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 drawn her inspiration from the real Sarajevo Haggadah. As she explains in an afterword, little is known about this book, except that it has been saved from destruction on at least three occasions: twice by Muslims and once by a Roman Catholic priest. Building on these fragments of information, Brooks has created a fictional history that moves to Sarajevo in 1940, then back to late-19th-century Vienna, 15th-century Venice, Catalonia during the Spanish 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 one, bound with brutality and humiliation. Families who protect it are torn apart; the book itself is plundered to pay for a questionable medical cure, then lost in a game of chance. A particularly disturbing scene occurs during the Inquisition in a grotesquely named “place of relaxation” where those accused of heresy by the Spanish authorities are tortured.

Brooks’s extensive research is evident throughout, but she occasionally chokes her storytelling with historical detail; 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 illness.”

An inscription in the real 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 beauty of the Saracens’ fluid calligraphy moved him. Other times, it was the elegant argument 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 captive artist 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 coast, holding an enchanted staff, the artist believes that “the great sea would part, and I would cross it, and make my way, in slow stages, down 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 character, but as she travels to Vienna, Boston and London, meeting with experts who might help answer her questions about the Haggadah, the structure of the narrative works against her. A chapter that ends with Hanna wondering about the insect wing or the stain will be followed by a historical interlude solving that piece of the puzzle. Not only predictable, this back-and-forth scheme also creates a discrepancy: the reader learns far more than Hanna ever will.

Woven into the puzzle-solving is the account of Hanna’s 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 little book, anyway? Fixed all the dog-eared pages?”) Readers will eventually learn 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 found a less obtrusive way 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 gold beaters, the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders” are “the people I feel most comfortable with. Sometimes in the quiet these people speak to me.” Though the reader’s sense of Hanna’s relationship with the Haggadah rarely deepens to such a level, Geraldine Brooks’s certainly has.

Lisa Fugard has written frequently for The Times’s Travel section and is the author of a novel, “Skinner’s Drift.”

The Cellist Of Sarajevo

Andrew Riemer, reviewer
February 22, 2008

The everyday actions of ordinary men highlight the horrors of civil war.

The Canadian writer Steven Galloway was born in 1975. This is his third novel. In his afterword he identifies the inspiration for this lean and accomplished book. In 1992, not long after the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, 22 people were killed and scores injured when a mortar shell struck a queue outside a bakery. For the next 22 days, a well-known Sarajevo cellist played a slow, stately piece, usually attributed to the 17th-century Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni, to commemorate the victims.

That quiet, absorbed act of heroism forms the centrepiece of this fine book. Galloway does not overplay his hand. The cellist is no more than a focus for the three essentially separate narrative strands woven together in this compressed and foreshortened meditation on the horrors of civil war and the plight of people caught in a barbarous world.

Kenan lives in a flat with his wife and children. He has just turned 40 but he already feels like an old man. When we first meet him, he is about to set out on a long and hazardous journey to collect water for his family - and also, somewhat reluctantly, for a cranky old lady downstairs - from a brewery on the opposite side of the river.

Dragan, who is nearly 60, lives with his sister and her husband. Just before the war, he was able to send his wife and son to Italy; he hasn't heard from them for months. He works in a bakery, where he is paid in bread even on those days when he's not rostered for work. Like Kenan, he too sets out on a perilous journey to the other side of the city to collect his wages.

As they weave their separate ways through ruined streets, waiting behind barricades or in a sheltered doorway before plunging across an open space or trying to cross a bridge, always alert to the possibility that snipers in the hills or on the rooftops might have them in their sights, they remember Sarajevo as it used to be before the madness and the hatred: a pleasant, civilised city. Their journeys bring them face to face with horror, mindless brutality and also fleeting moments of compassion.

Galloway reveals considerable skill in the way he allows these ordinary and by no means exceptional men to act as conduits for his larger preoccupations: the insanity of civil war, the barbarism that always accompanies it and the callousness of those who draw handsome profits from suffering and from disrupted lives. Nothing is overstated here and for that reason Kenan's and Dragan's odysseys (or is it calvaries?) prove all the more memorable.

The third strand in the novel is somewhat less assured. This deals with a young woman known only as Arrow, a sharpshooter who has been ordered to safeguard the cellist. It is in these sections that Galloway articulates the ethical puzzles faced by combatants in civil conflicts such as the one that tore Sarajevo apart for almost four years.

I have no doubt that he has considered these issues deeply and sincerely. With Arrow's story - suggested by a broadcast documentary on Danish radio - he is able to expose the corrosive effects of a world in which every individual is reduced to being either one of "them" or one of "us". At the end, Arrow's integrity is unblemished.

There is, nevertheless, something contrived about her story. It is undeniably suspenseful, yet the crisis of conscience she experiences when she is ordered to act in a way contrary to her ethical impulses struck me as somewhat mechanical and predictable. Elsewhere, with Kenan and Dragan, and also with the cellist himself, Galloway is far more successful in presenting such abstract concerns in terms of everyday lives.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews ... 62870.html