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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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People of
the Book by Geraldine Brooks |
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Rating: |
**** |
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(Highly Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Transported A
book about a book, and a novel at that. Who cares? I, for one. Geraldine
Brooks presents a fictional account of a real book in her new novel, People of
the Book. The book is the Sarajevo Haggadah, created in medieval Spain, a
rate illuminated Jewish manuscript. The protagonist, Hanna Heath, is a
thirty-year-old Australian book conservator, who is hired in 1996 to restore
the book as needed, after it has survived the war in Bosnia. The action
alternates between present and past as Hanna works to preserve the book, and
the clues she uncovers expand to flashbacks of what happened with the book
over hundreds of years. Here’s an excerpt, from
chapter 2 of the section titled, “Hanna: Sarajevo, Spring 1996,” pp. 18-21: Ozren
Karaman was looking at me with a bemused expression. I suddenly felt
embarrassed. "Sorry, you know all that, of course. But it's a bit of an
obsession with me, and once I get started ..." I was only digging a
deeper hole, so I stopped. "The thing is, they've given me only a week's
access to the book, so I really need every minute. I'd like to get
started.... I'll have it till six this evening, yes?" "No,
not quite. I'll need to take it about ten minutes before the hour, to get it
secured before the bank guards change shifts." "All
right," I said, drawing my chair in close. I inclined my head to the
other end of the long table where the security detachment sat. `Any chance we
could get rid of a few of them?" He
shook his uncombed head. "I'm afraid we'll all be staying." I
couldn't help the sigh that escaped me. My work has to do with objects, not
people. I like matter, fiber, the nature of the varied stuffs that go to make
a book. I know the flesh and fabrics of pages, the bright earths and lethal
toxins of ancient pigments. Wheat paste—I can bore the pants off anyone about
wheat paste. I spent six months in Japan, learning how to mix it for just the
necessary amount of tension. Parchment,
especially, I love. So durable it can last for centuries, so fragile it can
be destroyed in a careless instant. One of the reasons, I'm sure, that I got
this job was because I have written so many journal articles on parchment. I
could tell, just from the size and scatter of the pore holes, that the
parchments in front of me had been made from the skin of a now-extinct breed
of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep. You can date manuscripts from the
kingdoms of Aragon and Castile to within a hundred years or so if you know
when that particular breed was all the go with the local parchment makers. Parchment
is leather, essentially, but it looks and feels different because the dermal
fibers in the skin have been reorganized by stretching. Wet it, and the
fibers revert to their original, three-dimensional network. I had worried
about condensation within the metal box, or exposure to the elements during
transport. But there was very little sign of either. There were some pages
that showed signs
of older water damage, but under the microscope I saw a rime of cube-shaped
crystals that I recognized: NaC1, also known as plain old table salt. The
water that had damaged this book was probably the saltwater used at the seder
table to represent the tears of the slaves in Egypt. 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, with his well-meaning scrutiny, or
the cops, with the low chatter of their radios, would keep my friendly ghosts
at bay. And I needed their help. There were so many questions. For a start, most books like
this, rich in such expensive pigments, had been made for palaces or
cathedrals. But a haggadah is used only at home. The word is from the Hebrew
root hgd, "to tell," and it comes from the biblical command
that instructs parents to tell their children the story of the Exodus. This
"telling" varies widely, and over the centuries each Jewish
community has developed its own variations on this home-based celebration. But no one knew why this
haggadah was illustrated with numerous miniature paintings, at a time when
most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments. It was
unlikely that a Jew would have been in a position to learn the skilled
painting techniques evinced here. The style was not unlike the work of
Christian illuminators. And yet, most of the miniatures illustrated biblical
scenes as interpreted in the Midrash, or Jewish biblical exegesis. I turned the parchment and
suddenly found myself gazing at the illustration that had provoked more
scholarly speculation than all the others. It was a domestic scene. A family
of Jews—Spanish, by their dress—sits at a Passover meal. We see the ritual
foods, the matzoh to commemorate the unleavened bread that the Hebrews baked
in haste on the night before they fled Egypt, a shank bone to remember the
lamb's blood on the doorposts that had caused the angel of death to
"pass over" Jewish homes. The father, reclining as per custom, to
show that he is a free man and not a slave, sips wine from a golden goblet as
his small son, beside him, raises a cup. The mother sits serenely in the
fine gown and jeweled headdress of the day. Probably the scene is a portrait
of the family who commissioned this particular haggadah. But there is
another woman at the table, ebony-skinned and saffron-robed, holding a piece
of matzoh. Too finely dressed to be a servant, and fully participating in the
Jewish rite, the identity of that African woman in saffron has perplexed the
book's scholars for a century. Slowly, deliberately, I
examined and made notes on the condition of each page. Each time I turned a
parchment, I checked and adjusted the position of the supporting forms.
Never stress the book—the conservator's chief commandment. But the people who
had owned this book had known unbearable stress: pogrom, Inquisition, exile,
genocide, war. As I reached the end of the
Hebrew text, I came to a line of script in another language, another hand. Revisto
per mi. Gio. Domenico Vistorini,
1609. The Latin, written in the Venetian style, translated as "Surveyed
by me." Were it not for those three words, placed there by an official
censor of the pope's Inquisition, this book might have been destroyed that
year in Venice, and would never have crossed the Adriatic to the Balkans. "Why did you save it,
Giovanni?" I looked up, frowning. It was
Dr. Karaman, the librarian. He gave a tiny, apologetic shrug. Probably he
thought I was irritated at the interruption, but actually I was surprised
that he had voiced the very question in my mind. No one knew the answer; any
more than they knew how or why—or even when—the book had come to this city. A
bill of sale from 1894 stated that someone named Kohen had sold it to the
library. But no one had thought to question the seller. And since World War
II, when two-thirds of the Jews in Sarajevo were slaughtered and the city's
Jewish quarter ransacked, there had been no Kohens
left in the city to ask. A Muslim librarian had saved the book from the Nazis
then, too, but the details of how he'd done it were sparse and conflicting. When
I had completed the notes on my initial examination, I set up an eight-by-ten
camera and worked through again from the beginning, photographing every page
so as to make an accurate record of the book's condition before any
conservation work was attempted. When I was done with the conservation work
and before I re-bound the pages, I would photograph each page again. I would
send the negatives to Amitai in Jerusalem. He would direct the making of a
set of high-grade prints for the world's museums and the printing of a
facsimile edition that ordinary people everywhere would be able to enjoy.
Normally, a specialist would do those photos, but the UN didn't want to jump
through the hoops of finding another expert that passed muster with all the
city's constituencies, so I'd agreed to do it. I
flexed my shoulders and reached for my scalpel. Then I sat, my chin resting
on one hand, the other poised over the binding. Always a moment of
self-doubt, at the instant before you begin. The light glinted on the bright
steel, and made me think of my mother. If she hesitated like this, the
patient would bleed out on the table. But my mother, the first woman to chair
a department of neurosurgery in the history of Australia, was a stranger to
self-doubt. She hadn't doubted her right to flout every convention of her
era, bearing a child without troubling to take a husband, or even naming a
father. To this day, I have no idea who he was. Someone she loved? Someone
she used? The latter, more likely. She thought she was going to raise me in
her own image. What a joke. She's fair and perpetually tennis-tanned; I'm
dark and pale as a Goth. She has champagne tastes. I prefer beer straight out
of the tinnie. The
writing throughout The
People of the Book is superb, and Brooks does a great job in presenting
complex characters efficiently, as she transports readers through time and
place. In many respects, the author’s job was the same as Hanna described as
her job on pages 264-5: “I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book,
the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it. I wanted it to
be a gripping narrative, even suspenseful.” She succeeded. The People
of the Book is highly recommended. Steve
Hopkins, March 21, 2008 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/People of the Book.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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