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 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. 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.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.
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