I mentioned buying People of the Book a day or two ago on my blog and now today there is a review in The New York Times:
A Literal Page Turner of a Mystery
“For the librarians,” says the dedication page of Geraldine Brooks’s new novel, “People of the Book.” That’s an understatement. What librarian could resist a novel that has the word book in its title, is centered on an intrepid book conservator, exults in book-preservation exotica (“I know the flesh and fabrics of pages, the bright earths and lethal toxins of ancient pigments”) and has a plot about a rare book with a long, fraught and serpentine history?
But the intense bibliographic appeal of “People of the Book” turns out to be a mixed blessing. It lands Ms. Brooks neck-deep in research. It overburdens her tale in ways that make it more admirable than gripping.
Although nobility is one of this work’s most conspicuous attributes, “People of the Book” is also schematic and histrionic, piling serial tales of suffering onto the Sarajevo Haggadah and those who determined its fate. When one character threatens to put the Haggadah in jeopardy, another character warns, “You will be sowing intercommunal dissent over the very artifact that was meant to stand for the survival of our multiethnic ideal.”
The novel’s main character, a plucky Australian named Hanna Heath, is summoned to Sarajevo by the United Nations in 1996. She is invited to document the Sarajevo Haggadah, a centuries-old illuminated manuscript of the text that accompanies the Jewish Passover Seder, and an artifact that surfaced at a Sarajevo museum in 1894 and was said to be worth $700 million when it was appraised in 1991, though its value transcends the financial.
As an Australian, Hanna is considered neutral enough to give the book’s codex a fair assessment. As a scholar, she is equipped to detect and analyze clues about what the Haggadah has been through and where it has been hiding.
The book survived the Bosnian war (which Ms. Brooks covered as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal), one sign of its amazing resilience. There are other such signs in the novel, and each has been given a distinct section. So when Hanna finds a trace of an insect’s wing, it belongs to not just any old butterfly. It belongs to Parnassius mnemosyne leonhardiana, which, Hanna learns, feeds only on an Alpine variety of larkspur. How did the Haggadah climb into the Alps?
That question yields a part of the book called “An Insect’s Wing.” It is set in Sarajevo in 1940, and presents a young Jewish laundress named Lola, who winds up separated from her family in one of the book’s many wrenching, murderous scenarios. Lola is helped by Stela, a privileged Albanian Muslim, as German forces approach and the Jewish community is savaged. Stela is married to Serif, a scholar determined to resist the Nazis’ plundering of cultural artifacts. Although Stela and Serif Kamal are fictitious, they are based on members of the Korkut family, whose bravery inspired Ms. Brooks and whose role in preserving the Haggadah was real.
This kind of cross-cultural cooperation is at the heart of “People of the Book.” That heart is clearly in the right place. And the “Insect’s Wing” segment is rich in stirring and meaningful detail. Ms. Brooks weaves Jewish partisans, debate over Palestine, Allied parachute operations and Bosnia’s brutal, homegrown conflicts into a rich and eventful tapestry.
That question yields a part of the book called “An Insect’s Wing.” It is set in Sarajevo in 1940, and presents a young Jewish laundress named Lola, who winds up separated from her family in one of the book’s many wrenching, murderous scenarios. Lola is helped by Stela, a privileged Albanian Muslim, as German forces approach and the Jewish community is savaged. Stela is married to Serif, a scholar determined to resist the Nazis’ plundering of cultural artifacts. Although Stela and Serif Kamal are fictitious, they are based on members of the Korkut family, whose bravery inspired Ms. Brooks and whose role in preserving the Haggadah was real.
This kind of cross-cultural cooperation is at the heart of “People of the Book.” That heart is clearly in the right place. And the “Insect’s Wing” segment is rich in stirring and meaningful detail. Ms. Brooks weaves Jewish partisans, debate over Palestine, Allied parachute operations and Bosnia’s brutal, homegrown conflicts into a rich and eventful tapestry.
But then she degrades her story with the hokum of Hanna’s detective work, and with a conveniently hunky Sarajevan, who shows up in the book to make her adventure a little more interesting. “His green eyes regarded me, asking a question anyone could understand,” Hanna confides. Adding injury to insult, Ms. Brooks gives this man a gravely wounded baby son.
The forensic details of manuscript analysis are far more interesting and subtle than Hanna’s personal evolution. How did the Haggadah pick up a wine stain, cat’s hair or saltwater mark? How did it lose the silver clasps that are notable by their absence? Each of these questions has a chapter, and these puzzle pieces are interspersed with segments devoted to Hanna.
Every historical sequence is filled with danger, oppression and high drama. The Haggadah did not get to Sarajevo from 15th-century Spain on happy stories. (Ms. Brooks envisions Seville as its point of origin, in a sequence involving a 14-year-old African girl who is enslaved to an emir and paints so well that she can use a cat’s hair to put a picture on a rice grain.)
The forensic details of manuscript analysis are far more interesting and subtle than Hanna’s personal evolution. How did the Haggadah pick up a wine stain, cat’s hair or saltwater mark? How did it lose the silver clasps that are notable by their absence? Each of these questions has a chapter, and these puzzle pieces are interspersed with segments devoted to Hanna.
Every historical sequence is filled with danger, oppression and high drama. The Haggadah did not get to Sarajevo from 15th-century Spain on happy stories. (Ms. Brooks envisions Seville as its point of origin, in a sequence involving a 14-year-old African girl who is enslaved to an emir and paints so well that she can use a cat’s hair to put a picture on a rice grain.)
Ms. Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “March,” the novel in which she imagined the Civil War experiences of the paternal figure from Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” But “People of the Book” is not notably literary. It intermingles painful yet inspiring cross-cultural encounters with “Aha!” moments of detective work that seem contrived, no matter how accurate they happen to be.
It strains for the momentum of a “Da Vinci Code” but is bogged down by convoluted ambitions. It packs a few too many repetitive emotional wallops. And it piles on the coincidences, to the point where Hanna’s life is made every bit as eventful as that of the African slave. (“‘How is your latest tatty little book, anyway?’” taunts Hanna’s nasty mother, a world-famous surgeon with a terrible secret. “Fixed all the dog-eared pages?”)
And Ms. Brooks has a far easier time animating her investigative research than she does finding flesh-and-blood characters to inhabit it. The best-drawn figures here are those based on real people (like Judah Aryeh, a Venetian character inspired by “The Autobiography of a 17th-Century Rabbi”) and invested with real historical importance. The weakest, like the kindly book expert who reminds Hanna of the grandfather she never knew, come from Central Casting. And the cameos literally amount to overkill. Even Torquemada gets a walk-on during the Spanish Inquisition.
1 comment:
Well I am adding that to my list of "to reads". I haven't read "March" but Brooks' novel of the Plague "Year of wonders" was a pretty stunning work.
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