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Geraldine Brooks’ ‘People of the Book’ is a Novel Everyone Should Read
A review
Geraldine Brooks is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March, but her 2008 follow-up effort, People of the Book, may be even better. The novel is, interestingly enough, the fictional story of a real-life book, the Sarajevo Haggadah. The Sarajevo Haggadah is one of the first Jewish religious books to contain images, written and illuminated at a time when only Christian texts were illuminated because both Jews and Muslims considered it idolatrous.
The main human character is rare book expert Hanna Heath, and the book’s journey from Spain in 1492 to Sarajevo in 1996 is unveiled through some very small items she finds while restoring the book: an insect wing, missing silver clasps, some salt crystals, a wine stain, and a single white hair. As Hanna pursues her scientific investigation of the book, a series of vignettes explain how these sparse items trace the history of the Haggadah over the past 500 years: from Spain at the time of the Inquisition to Renaissance Venice to Sarajevo in both World War II and the ethnic wars of the 1990s.
Taken by itself, the part of the narrative featuring Hanna and her efforts regarding the preservation of the book is much like any number of other bibliomysteries, from The Name of the Rose to The Codex to The Dante…
