People of the Book: A Novel | Geraldine Brooks | An excellent intertwining of tales

People of the Book: A Novel | Geraldine Brooks | Wonderful Book

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People of the Book...

	People of the Book: A Novel Geraldine Brooks Viking Adult, 2008 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 136 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An excellent intertwining of tales

The most profound effect that this book had on me was to make me realize just how much is tied to inanimate objects. I dearly love going to museums and though I occasionally do wonder what life was like for the person who fashioned that ancient goblet or who wore that suit of armor, I have never found myself reflecting on it as profoundly as I did after reading this book. Brooks did a wonderful job of instilling in me, as a reader, a sense of how a seemingly innocuous object as an ancient, illuminated book can bear witness to centuries of human drama. The book masterfully recreated the sense of urgency that exists in everyday life while showing that everyday life is so fleeting and that one's time on the planet is so short as to be merely a thread in the tapestry that history has woven.

The book opens in 1996, with Hanna, a book restorer and expert on ancient manuscripts who has been asked to examine and make repairs to the Sarajevo haggadah, an ancient book that is something akin to a Jewish book of hours. While restoring the book, Hanna finds an insect wing, a dark stain, some salt crystals, and a white hair. She uses these objects in an attempt to trace the history of the book.

It is at this point that People of the Book really becomes a wonder. Brooks does a masterful job of creating a contemporary drama--that of Hanna's quest and events in her own personal life--that is interwoven with a series of historical dramas. This book is a story within a story within a story and it serves as a reminder of how history tends to loop back on itself. Tied to each of the four pieces of evidence that Hanna has found in the book is a story that tells one small part of the tale of the haggadah's creation and journey and each of these stories takes us further back in time.

This is a book so vivid and rich that I find it difficult to describe. Brooks has a mastery of words and though the locations and the eras she describes are all vastly different, what stands out is her depictions of humanity in all its greatness and flaws. Hanna's own journey could have made for a good novel in and of itself but Brooks gives it more impact by casting it against the tales of all those who have been touched by the book long before Hanna.

What is really remarkable about the novel is how it highlights the sameness of the struggles of its Jewish protagonists. As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same and this is certainly the argument that this novel makes. Brooks charts a course of history that shows how, time and again, people of the Jewish faith have been made victims because of that faith, how one day Jews live peacefully alongside Christians and Muslims and how they next they are being persecuted by those very neighbors. Though the novel suggests that the survival of the book itself is extraordinary, what is truly extraordinary is the actions of those who ensure the survival of the book. While the chance to behold such an ancient text is certainly a marvel, what is even more marvelous is to try to imagine the lives of those who saw to it that we could, one day, view that ancient text in a museum or in a library. This novel just proves how wonderful is Brooks's mind, that her experiences with an ancient text allowed her thoughts to take flight and to produce this sterling work of literature.

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Wonderful Book

People of the Book is a great story and wonderfully written. Each chapter alternates between the present and the past. The chapters of "the past" go further and further back in history and discusses the trial and tribulations of the book that the protaganist has restored. During the restoration, she finds artifacts that have been inadvertantly left in the book. Each chapter reads as its own short story discussing how the item got in the book and who owned the book at the time. I worried that it would be tough to follow, but it wasn't.

I highly recomend it.

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Better than "March"

Hanna Heath, rare book restorer, is called to Sarajevo in 1996 to help document and preserve a 15th c. Jewish haggadah (prayer book). She finds in its pages a few grains of salt, a wine stain, a white hair, and an insect's wing. As Hanna calls upon forensic friends to examine the odd extras, the book opens on separate chapters that explain the findings of those remnants and fill in a history of the `people of the book' as it changes hands through time. We are given the book's survival in World War II, its path backward through the Spanish Inquisition in 1609, the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, and its earliest artistry, in 1480. This book impressed me much more so than the author's much lauded "March." It's inventive and clever and I really liked the evocation of time and place in the historical chapters. Brooks takes a real event, the discovery of the actual 'Sarajevo haggadah' and creates a rich and poignant fiction here.

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Lyrical and Hypnotizing- a beautiful story

I was first captured by the main character, Hannah Heath, but I found myself being even more captivated by some of the minor characters as the history of the Haggadah goes back in time to Venice, Seville, etc. I was enchanted by the slowly unfolding mystery and the creative way that Geraldine Brooks ties the history of the "people of the book" together over a 400-some year span.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, page 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

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