Down all the dusty roads that lead toward home
Geraldine Brooks’ part modern part historical novel with a book within the book as the major ‘character’ is a fascinating if not completely successful read.
Brooks does historical, not to mention geographical, extremely well, as evidenced by this and previous works – Year Of Wonders, her first book, about the plague in England in 1666 was very fine. Brooks is an Aussie, now resident in The States, and researches her different periods, different cultures, extremely well, so that readers do feel satisfying and realistically transported to times and places not their own.
The springboard for this particular book, People of The Book, has a real identity in the book itself, and in its known provenance in terms of times, places, events, as far as can be yielded by academic research.
Sarajevo Haggadah page, Wiki Commons, copyright expired
The ‘Book’ of the title is a famous (in ancient and rare book circles) tome called The Sarajevo Haggadah. Apologies to the cognoscenti, but for the benefit of those (like me) who had never heard of this book, a Haggadah is a Jewish text read at the Passover festival. The Sarajevo Haggadah, which dates from the fourteenth century, and is a beautifully illustrated manuscript, using hand ground paints, including colour from gems and minerals – lapis lazuli, copper, gold leaf, and hand written on specially prepared parchment from animal skins. It has a known, surprising history from the last century, being rescued from destruction twice by Muslims – once during the Second World War, by an Islamic scholar, who rescued it from certain destruction as a Jewish text, hiding it in a mosque. Then again, during the Bosnian war in the 90’s, when Sarajevo was under firebombing siege, it was rescued and hidden in a bank vault for safe-keeping by a Muslim librarian.
However, the much travelling Haggadah, which is thought to originate in Spain, during a period when Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted in peace, ‘the Convivencia’, can be traced along several journeys from the fourteenth century, mirroring the history of Jewry during various pogroms. The book had a home in Venice in the early seventeenth century, and surfaced in Bosnia at the latter part of the nineteenth century, when Bosnia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It got relocated to Vienna at this time.
Brooks tells the story of where the book was known to be at various times, and the writer’s imagination peoples the known history of the place and time, particularly around what is known about Jewish communities, and how Jews were allowed, or not, to be within the wider community of the time and place.
Map of the Sarajevo Haggadah’s journey – book endpapers
The historical sections, even though at some points she lectures rather on facts we need to know – how parchment was prepared, brushes and colours made, and who did these things, are in the main absolutely absorbing, and were the book merely presented unadorned as the history of the book, I would have loved it without reservation.
However what doesn’t work quite so well is the creation of a further story. The central person in the book is Hanna, an invented Australian rare book restorer, with her own troubled history – a difficult relationship with her neurosurgeon mother, the mystery of her own birth, and her trail past and present lovers. Even though Brooks is an Aussie, there is something almost too saltily overcharacterised in Hanna’s strine brashness, so she feels a little like an intelligent Aussie cipher with attitude, far less believable than the more distant inventions of the book within. Each time I came out of the past and into a Hanna section, my interest drifted, she seemed a bit of an authorial device, who had to be given credibility by her own back story, in order to achieve a particular narrative twist
The over arching story of the book, which almost acts as a real symbol of how humanity can transcend the divisions and enmities which the human race itself creates, is a testament to the importance of books, of knowledge and wisdom shared, of how much we can learn from other cultures from their book, and of the transcending power of books, their writers and their readers. And to the importance of a humanity prepared to accommodate each other in community. People, and their books, finding home.
As Brooks quotes, right at the start, from the nineteenth century German poet Heinrich Heine
There, where one burns books,
One in the end burns men
I was teased and steered towards this from another blogger, Carrie Rubin, making a
comment about it on the inestimable Jilanne Hoffman’s blog. I went immediately a-buying. A good, immersive read, not to mention a ping ping in the direction of both Carrie’s and Jillane’s blogs
Lady Fancifull 
I’m going to take a look at your friends’ blogs, but no interest in the book. Good review but thought it was too long. Thanks
Well you can see I’m not a fiction writer Wordman, stream of readerly consciousness bloggery!
….and, you are so good at it!
Lies on floor purring loudly in total capitulation to charm!
Thanks for an excellent review. For anyone new to Geraldine Brooks, I’d highly recommend two of her works: her first book, “Year of Wonders,” (which you mention)and her excellent book about the U.S. Civil War, “March.”
March is now a definite ‘on my back burner’ Erich, especially now I have read another of her books (reviewed on here next week I think, as a couple of others are already queued and ready to go!) ‘Foreign Correspondence’ I’ve already reviewed these on the Amazons. I am mightily impressed by Brooks. This factual book of hers (FC) provoked my reflections, made me laugh, brought me to tears, several times, an TAUGHT me lot about Australia, Australians, and about people who travel to find their home, and people who find a whole world where they already are, but stay open to the wide world, as well as people who stay boxed in.
Thanks for the tip — I’ll have to add “Foreign Correspondence” to my (ever-growing) list.
Hmm…this did sound fascinating as a history of the book, but I think like you the addition of a fictional story would make me grind my teeth a bit, especially since it all sounds as if it’s been done a little clumsily. Reminds me a bit of my objections to Frayn’s Headlong, but in reverse – there I felt he allowed the fictional story to be slowed to a crawl by a lot of dully-told research.
Excellent review, BTW – and a perfect length! 😉
I haven’t read Headlong, but I loved Spies. As you know i am fascinated by writers writing books for adults with a child or someone going back into their childhood world. I think its something about being aware (I can remember very clearly almost the ‘click’ of suddenly seeing the world through grown-up eyes, when fairly young, and being aware it was different. For a time you have experience from both sides, and then you are, in the main, shut out from that other world. I’m fascinated by how the very very young, the pre-verbal, experience the world, and how language is learned. Its easy enough to understand and conceptualise objects, but how do we learn the concepts of emotion. It starts, I guess, with someone telling us what we are feeling from their observation of us, and we then learn to apply that word to how it felt from inside of us, but learning how to distance ourselves enough from what we feel to say ‘I feel …….’ is one of those worlds you can’t go back to, a sort of I guess, formless swirl of sensations that you ARE, rather than distant enough from to FEEL. if that makes any sense.
Interesting – since that would mean that language was a prerequisite to conceptualising emotion. I suspect there’s much truth in that, and that it goes some way to explaining why more ‘educated’ societies tend to be more prone to ’emotionalising’ – not totally sure that that’s always a strength though. I often wonder if some of the psychological traumas that seem to follow people from bad childhood experiences are ‘felt’ as opposed to being as a result of expectation of how they should be ‘felt’. There seems little doubt that people are under more pressure to show emotion than in the past and repressing emotion is considered unhealthy, but I often wonder if, in many cases, the old attitude of stiff upper lip, grin and bear it, didn’t actually make it easier to cope with horrors. It’s hard to see how people could have survived emotionally otherwise in the days when horrors were commonplace – multiple child deaths, for instance.
Hmm interesting one – though I’d contrast the stiff upper lipped English funeral demeanour where it would be seen as quite beyond the pale to emote in an abandoned orgy of hear and clothes rending, casting yourself on top of the coffin etc, with the more obvious emoting of some cultures which are not so ‘educated’.
I guess there is always an extremely fine and constantly shifting balance point, both for societies at large AND individuals within those societies, between the expression and release of emotion – which at an extreme can be getting stuck into almost and over-identification and sentimental indulgence of the-whatever-it-is, and the other side, the restraint and inhibition of the emotion – which at its extreme leads to repression and denial and even splitting off and dissociating from feeling.
One side loses reason, the other loses heart, is my pop analysis of both extremes.
I think (the horrors of multiple child deaths) idea, perhaps there is a difference between the expected workings of ‘life is like that’ – an impersonal fatalism around what might be expected, and the horror of what shouldn’t be, because it involves choice, made by a person or persons. ‘Natural law’ which may at worst indicate an indifferent universe is more bearable than human actions which can only be seen as personal or impersonal malevolence. If I get struck by lightening I’m sure that friends and rellies would be deeply upset and grieve my loss, but if I get struck by a bullet as a bystander on a drive-by shooting, it would I’m sure raise a whole other raft of feelings
<b<Geraldine Brook's books always intrigue me, but don’t always meet expectations, however there is something enticing about them that always makes me want to read more, perhaps it is her thorough research, her promise of a good yarn, insight into history with engaging characters, but sometimes it is as if she holds something back and doesn’t take the risks I wish her to take, however those same risks often create further problems as you mention.
I haven’t read this one, and am slightly hesitant.
That’s a really interesting point, the sweet spot between holding back and taking a risk.
I very much liked the factual book of hers i mentioned on this post’s comment thread, in my response to Erich Rupprecht. There’s a lot of LIFE risk in that (autobiographical) and i found her engaging me completely
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