People of the Book

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
Fiction, 2008, 372 pages
Ratings: 4.0 (Amazon 4.0)
Recommended by: Book Reviews - Book Pages
Summary :
Amazon Significant Seven, January 2008: One of the earliest Jewish religious volumes to be illuminated with images, the Sarajevo Haggadah survived centuries of purges and wars thanks to people of all faiths who risked their lives to safeguard it. Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, has turned the intriguing but sparely detailed history of this precious volume into an emotionally rich, thrilling fictionalization that retraces its turbulent journey. In the hands of Hanna Heath, an impassioned rare-book expert restoring the manuscript in 1996 Sarajevo, it yields clues to its guardians and whereabouts: an insect wing, a wine stain, salt crystals, and a white hair. While readers experience crucial moments in the book's history through a series of fascinating, fleshed-out short stories, Hanna pursues its secrets scientifically, and finds that some interests will still risk everything in the name of protecting this treasure. A complex love story, thrilling mystery, vivid history lesson, and celebration of the enduring power of ideas, People of the Book will surely be hailed as one of the best of 2008.
Favorite Passages :
This book weaved a story around the history of the book, the "Sarajevo Haggadah", an illustrated manuscript dating back to the middle ages (origin @1350 in Barcelona) and the life of the fictional person sent to restore it the spring of 1996.
The first passage is from a conversation between the priest in charge of "removing the corrupting influence of the Jews" at the time the the Inquisition and a Rabbi. The priest wanted the rabbi to have the Jewish publishing houses to censor themselves, to which the priest replies:......(page 156) ....And I will say nothing to the printing house, as my conscience requires me. Censura praevia or censura repressiva, the effect is the same. Either way, a book is destroyed. Better you do it than have us so intellectually enslaved that we do it for you."
Second passage is after the protagonist, Hanna, in a conversation with her mother after she learns, at the age of 30, that her father is a famous author. Growing up, she knew nothing of her father and had a very sterile, strained relationship with her mother. She continued to try to maintain contact until she learned her mother, a famous neurosurgeon, had let her father die of a "bleeder" after surgery for a tumor, because he would have been blind and the mother thought he would not have wanted to live if he were blind. After the discussion where when she learned this......(page 345) I don't see her anymore. We don't even go through the motions. Orzen had been right about one thing: some stories just don't have happy ending." The passage really made me ponder this idea ! ! !