Review: People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
People of the Book
by Geraldine Brooks
Of course, a book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand. The gold beaters the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders, those are the people I feel most comfortable with. Sometimes, in the quiet, these people speak to me. They let me see what their intentions were, and it helps me do my work. I worried that the kustos…would keep my friendly ghosts at bay. And I needed their help. There were so many questions.
- Hanna Heath, p. 19
These are the thoughts of Hanna Heath, a book conservator from Australia, as she examines the Sarajevo Haggadah, an ancient Jewish text. She has been hired to repair and protect the valuable manuscript. As she works, Hanna discovers little artifacts from the book’s many adventures: a stray hair, wine stains, a fragment of a butterfly wing, and salt crystals. Each item provides a clue about the history of the book, and launches the reader into a historical vignette. From Venice to Vienna and Seville to Sarajevo, the reader travels across Europe and through six centuries as Hanna struggles to unravel the mysteries of the people of this book.
The idea of People of the Book was a very interesting one. I love books that take famous works of art and explore their past, like Girl with a Pearl Earring, which told a romantic story about the model for Vermeer’s famous painting. Certainly a holy text that was used by Jewish families at the annual Passover celebration would have a rich story to tell.
Brooks never really shows the book being used for its intended purpose, however. In every historical flashback, the book or its owners face imminent destruction. A Catholic priest threatens to burn the book; a Jewish girl flees the Nazis to join a group of rebels. It seems like every scene is full of drama and passion. That’s interesting and all, but the constantly heightened tension can be exhausting. Some simple, quiet scenes from the book’s history would have done wonders to balance things out. As it was, as I continued to read I became rather dull to the horrors of the story, and ceased to care when characters were beaten, raped or tortured.
While the book was extremely rich in detail - verging into the realm of “info dumping” on more than a few occasions - the characters were often weakly portrayed. It was very black and white. Evil characters were truly bad, without a single redeeming factor. A bad man wouldn’t just be a liar and a crook, for example; he’d also be syphilitic, weak-willed, ugly, and thoroughly unpleasant. Of course, the one character we do get to know fairly well - Hanna - is an extremely difficult woman to like. It seemed like she couldn’t go a single chapter without reminding readers that she’d gone to school at Harvard and that she couldn’t get along with her mother, who was a difficult bitch of a surgeon always ragging on poor Hanna because she didn’t follow her mum to medical school. She was a very whiny woman, and after a while I just couldn’t stand her.
During each historical flashback, I found myself wondering about the reliability of each story. After all, Hanna claims early in the book (see the quote at the beginning of this post) that ghosts “speak” to her as she toils over her work. Are these accounts of medieval Spaniards and Renaissance cardinals merely the product of Hanna’s overactive imagination? I’m curious, if you’ve read this book, if you wondered about this, or did you just accept the stories from the past?
3 out of 5 stars
To read more about People of the Book, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.
The Sarajevo Haggadah, which inspired People of the Book