In "People of the Book" Geraldine Brooks has created an astonishing story based on the history of the actual Sarajevo Haggadah, an ancient Jewish prayer text. The Haggadah is an illuminated manuscript from the fourteenth century that went missing during the Serbian bombing of Sarajevo in 1992. The chief librarian of the Bosnian National Museum, a Muslim, risked his life to rescue the Haggadah. In 1996 the book has come to life again.
In Brooks’ novel Hannah Heath, a rare book specialist, a very skilled conservator, is chosen to work her powers on the Haggadah. She brings to her task her amazing ability to analyze, interpret and imagine parts of the journey the book has taken. Hannah discovers several bits in the aged text’s spine: a piece of an insect’s wing, a reddish stain, a grain of salt and a white hair. From these small spare clues she teases out the stories of several people giving us a very rich tapestry of character and place, spanning centuries and cities, Seville, Tarragona, Venice, Vienna. And we follow another road, Hannah’s other journey, her own story, revealing fiction, intrigue and deceit as she criss crosses continents tracking the Haggadah's clues.
Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer prize for fiction for her novel “March”. Her work for the Wall Street Journal as a foreign correspondent in Bosnia, the Middle East and Somalia have greatly informed her writing of other peoples, other cultures.
by KZ
In Brooks’ novel Hannah Heath, a rare book specialist, a very skilled conservator, is chosen to work her powers on the Haggadah. She brings to her task her amazing ability to analyze, interpret and imagine parts of the journey the book has taken. Hannah discovers several bits in the aged text’s spine: a piece of an insect’s wing, a reddish stain, a grain of salt and a white hair. From these small spare clues she teases out the stories of several people giving us a very rich tapestry of character and place, spanning centuries and cities, Seville, Tarragona, Venice, Vienna. And we follow another road, Hannah’s other journey, her own story, revealing fiction, intrigue and deceit as she criss crosses continents tracking the Haggadah's clues.
Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer prize for fiction for her novel “March”. Her work for the Wall Street Journal as a foreign correspondent in Bosnia, the Middle East and Somalia have greatly informed her writing of other peoples, other cultures.
by KZ
