People of the Book (novel)

People of the Book is a 2008 historical novel by Geraldine Brooks. The story focuses on imagined events surrounding the protagonist and real historical past of the still extant Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest surviving Jewish illuminated texts.[1]

People of the Book
First edition cover
AuthorGeraldine Brooks
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreHistorical fiction
PublisherViking Penguin
Publication date
January 1, 2008
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages372 pages
ISBN978-0-670-01821-5
OCLC123912702

Plot summary

The novel tells the fictional story of Dr. Hanna Heath, an Australian book conservator who comes to Sarajevo to restore the Haggadah. Her work on the book leaves her with questions: why is the book illustrated, unlike other Haggadot? Why was the last restoration job, a hundred years earlier, done so poorly? What happened to the metal clasps that once held the parchment pages pressed together? How did the Haggadah come from fifteenth-century Spain to the Balkans? In the course of the restoration she takes microscopic samples: fragments of a butterfly's wing caught in the spine, a long white cat hair tangled in the binding, traces of salt crystals, a wine stain mixed with blood.

The story alternates between showing Hanna researching the Haggadah in the present, searching archives and taking her samples to forensic labs, and following the history of the Haggadah across five hundred years, in reverse chronological order, revealing the (fictional) explanations for all of Hanna's discoveries.[2]

Factual background

The book's Afterword briefly explains which parts of the novel are based on fact and which are imaginary. Geraldine Brooks wrote an article for The New Yorker that provides more details about the Sarajevo Haggadah and its real-life rescuers, especially Dervis Korkut, who hid it from the Nazis. It also explains that Lola, the young Jewish guerrilla fighter in the novel, is based on a real person named Mira Papo, who was sheltered by Dervis Korkut and his wife Servet.[3]

Critical reception

The novel has been compared with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, with USA Today calling it an erudite version of Brown's work, while other reviewers have noted that it is slower paced, that there are no cliffhangers, and that readers "are never convinced . . . (by its) contrived and cliched personal story."[1][4][5]

Awards
  • 2008: The Australian Book Industry Award (ABIA) Book of the Year and Literary Fiction Book of the Year[6]
gollark: How wasteful.
gollark: Or, well, the obvious alternative.
gollark: Maybe. On the one hand I at least like to think I'm vaguely better than average at actually paying attention to explanations for things and won't just immediately consign them to "outgroup → bad" or "not convention → bad". On the other hand probably most people think that since people are bad at comparing things. On the third hand, which I totally have, the alternative is to just assume people doing things are probably right, which seems wrong.
gollark: No, which is why I said I didn't care that much.
gollark: > that might be valid but itS' also an easy to abuse excuse to dislike almost anything> because you can always say that you don't see the pointThis is typically why people explain things.

References
  1. Susan Kelly (January 9, 2008). "'People of the Book': An erudite 'Da Vinci Code'". USA Today. Retrieved 2009-12-18.
  2. Lisa Fugard (January 20, 2008). "All the World's a Page". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-12-18.
  3. "The Book of Exodus" (PDF). The New Yorker. December 3, 2007. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 21, 2012. Retrieved March 9, 2011. This article also provides the image from the Sarajevo Haggadah that shows a woman with African features seated at the seder table.
  4. Janet Maslin (January 7, 2008). "A Literal Page Turner of a Mystery". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-12-18.
  5. Jessica Marsden (January 18, 2008). "'People of the Book' still no 'Da Vinci Code'". Yale Daily News. Retrieved 2009-12-18.
  6. "Brooks wins Book of the Year award". The Sydney Morning Herald. June 16, 2008. Retrieved 2009-12-18.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.