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2008 Book Reviews

 

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Rating:

****

 

(Highly Recommended)

 

 

 

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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

 

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