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Chargement... People of the Book: A Novel (édition 2008)par Geraldine Brooks
Information sur l'oeuvreLe livre d'Hanna par Geraldine Brooks
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. This was good but I wanted it to be better. I loved the concept but didn't really love any of the people and I think the writer wanted me too. I'm glad I didn't look for photos of the real Sarajevo Haggadah because the images in my mind were more spectacular than the real thing - credit there to both the cover art and to Geraldine Brooks because the chapter on how Zahra learned to paint really made me conjure up something different in my mind. Overall I feel good about the author and would read more of her work. Wonderful story! This is a book lover's book. Generally I dislike books where chapters bounce around from one time period to another, but this book proved the exception. Briefly, "People of the Book" begins with an Aussie conservator arriving in 1996 Sarajevo to work on an ancient Haggadah. In every other chapter we read about her relationships and her travels across Europe, to the US and back to Australia while researching this beautiful, ancient book. The alternating chapters reach back in time moving through the chain of people through the centuries who kept the book safe from wars and book burnings until we finally get to discover the artist who created it. Each of the stories is wonderfully told. I agree with the book jacket that it’s a “..compulsively readable adventure story…” I custodi del libro cerca di immaginare e ricostruire la storia della Haggadah di Sarajevo, un libro che sembra aver avuto una vita piuttosto turbolenta, visto che si pensa sia nato intorno al 1350 a Barcellona e che sia finito nei Balcani seguendo le tristi vicende del popolo ebraico. In generale, la Haggadah è una forma di narrazione del Talmud: tra quelle più rilevanti c’è la Haggadah di Pesach, che viene letta durante il Seder, un momento del rituale della Pasqua ebraica durante il quale si racconta della liberazione dalla schiavitù del popolo ebraico. Con una storia così affascinante spero che possiate capire il mio sconcerto quando, appena al terzo capitolo, Brooks ci infila una storia d’amore tra la restauratrice della Haggadah di Sarajevo e il suo custode. Ma che me ne frega? Io voglio sapere tutto di questo libro: era iniziato così bene con un sacco di dettagli interessanti sulla restaurazione e sulla conservazione di questo genere di oggetto e poi mi ritrovo questз che si fanno gli occhi dolci. Son contenta per loro – per carità! – ma insomma la storia di un’antichissima Haggadah mi sembrava prioritaria rispetto al loro attacco di ormonella. Proseguendo nella lettura, mi è diventato evidente che lo scopo di Brooks era dimostrare, tramite la storia della Haggadah di Sarajevo, l’importanza della collaborazione tra esseri umani anche di culture diverse e di come questa collaborazione dia dei frutti meravigliosi, sia da un punto di vista prettamente culturale, sia dal punto di vista della solidarietà umana (compreso fate l’amore e non la guerra, evidentemente). Un messaggio indubbiamente molto bello e al quale in questi giorni sono particolarmente sensibile, ma che mi ha messo i brividi per il modo in cui Brooks lo ha veicolato. Il fatto è che Hanna, la restauratrice, ha tutte le caratteristiche della poser progressista: si pensa una donna di mentalità aperta, ma poi pensa e fa cose che hanno fatto esplodere il mio disagiometro. Per esempio, ha un amico che definisce di razza indefinita e antesignano dei magnifici meticci che popoleranno la terra da qui a un millennio perché ha un albero genealogico dove di recente si sono intrecciate parecchie caratteristiche fenotipiche diverse. Non paga, siccome questo tizio ha una moglie figlia di altrettanta varietà fenotipica, Hanna afferma di morire dalla voglia di vedere i loro figli, che sarebbero stati perfetti come pubblicità della Benetton. Pensa quanto sarà contento l’amico di sapere che lui e la sua famiglia sono solo una bella bandiera da sventolare… Insomma, sembra che questo libro sia una delle pietre che lastricano la strada delle buone intenzioni che porta all’inferno: vi consiglio quindi di resistere alla tentazione di leggere questo romanzo sulla Haggadah di Sarajevo e di cercare altrove testi migliori.
While peering through a microscope at a rime of salt crystals on the manuscript of the Haggadah, Hanna reflects that “the gold beaters, the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders” are “the people I feel most comfortable with. Sometimes in the quiet these people speak to me.” Though the reader’s sense of Hanna’s relationship with the Haggadah rarely deepens to such a level, Geraldine Brooks’s certainly has. Brooks' novel meticulously, lovingly amalgamates mystery and history with the personal story of its heroine, rare-book expert and conservator Hanna Heath. If Brooks becomes the new patron saint of booksellers, she deserves it. The stories of the Sarajevo Haggadah, both factual and fictional, are stirring testaments to the people of many faiths who risked all to save this priceless work. Appartient à la série éditorialeContient un guide de lecture pour étudiantPrix et récompensesDistinctionsListes notables
In 1996, Hanna Heath, a young Australian book conservator is called to analyze the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a priceless six-hundred-year-old Jewish prayer book that has been salvaged from a destroyed Bosnian library. When Hanna discovers a series of artifacts in the centuries' old binding, she unwittingly exposes an international cover up. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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The narrative swaps between the mid-nineties to early-noughties "present" and a reverse chronology of the haggadah's creation and subsequent changing of hands. This journey takes us to Yugoslavia at the outbreak of the second world war, fin-de-siecle Vienna and 15th century Seville among other places.
Brooks has created a mixed bag of characters. The present-day book conservator, Hanna Heath, is a consummate craftswoman charged with readying the Haggadah for exhibition as the dust is still settling over Sarajevo after the 1990's war. Hanna is Australian, a fact that Brooks beats you over the head with at every opportunity. I found Hanna's character difficult to believe in. On the one hand, she's a highly-educated, well-travelled, skilled technician and on the other she uses archaic Strine in a way I've never heard anyone do in the real world.
Happily, the historical characters are much more engaging. Lola, a Jewish teenager in Sarajevo who narrowly escapes the clutches of the invading Nazis to life on the run in the mountains with a rag-tag band of baby guerillas. Florien Mittl, an anti-Semitic Viennese book-binder dying of tertiary syphilis. Domenico Vistorini, a Catholic priest and Inquisition censor, and charismatic Judah Aryeh, rabbi and denizen of the original "geto" in early 17th century Venice. Their lives, and the politics and social pressures of their times, each propel the haggadah from one unlikely custodian to the next.
Geraldine Brooks is an excellent historical novelist. She takes the gaps between what and who are known and documented, and fills them in with such precision that you can smell the boiling gall, hear the swish of oars in the canal, feel the walls of tiny ghetto dwellings closing in. She gives such a strong sense of place and time that it's jarring to be wrenched back to 1996 to some vitriolic argument between Hanna and her truly awful mother. The book really shines when we're in Venice or Seville hundreds of years ago. It falls down in post-war Sarajevo, Boston, London and Sydney.
A guest on ABC TV's First Tuesday Bookclub suggested to viewers who were new to Brooks' work that they start with Year of Wonders or March, but existing fans would enjoy this novel. As a fan, I did enjoy the book, but can see it's weaknesses. These I choose to forgive. ( )