People of the Book

Categories: Fiction

A very popular genre in recent years has been the history-hopping novel where the author tells a story by tracing a work of art or literature through the centuries and illuminating each generation’s response to it.  Girl in Hyacinth Blue, by Susan Vreeland, was one, The Dream of Scipio, by Iain Pears was another, and Lord Byron’s Novel, by John Crowley still another superb example.

Well, here’s a very readable and enjoyable novel based on the same premise, and this time the found object is both literature and art:  a rare illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain that finally turns up in twentieth-century Sarajevo.  The novel that tells that manuscript’s story is People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks.

Australian manuscript conservator Hanna Heath is called in by a museum librarian in Sarajevo to preserve the unusual haggidah, which has miraculously survived the ethnic cleansings in that city as just the latest chapter in its long and violent history.  She discovers tiny physical traces of the book’s past—a bloodstain, a fleck of butterfly wing, a cat’s hair, salt crystals—in its pages and binding.

As Hanna investigates the provenance of each of these clues, the novel jumps back in time through the centuries to reveal how each came to be in the book and to tell the tale of each person through its history who helped protect the book against destruction:  a Jewish partisan during World War II, a seventeenth-century Venetian Inquisitor charged with purging heretical books, the daughter of a Jewish calligrapher at the time of  Ferdinand and Isabella’s expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and so on.  The final bit of backtracking traces the unusual manuscript’s creators.

It’s a fascinating journey through the ages. Lots of readers are going to enjoy Brooks’ detailed historical research, her very readable style, and the knowledge that it’s all inspired by a true story, the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah.