People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Several years ago I read Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks and fell in love with her intelligent way of opening up the real world to me. Not a fictional world made up of believable people, but a shockingly different world than my own that truly exists.

After reading positive review after positive review, I picked up People of the Book, her latest novel. Here she has mixed fact and fiction in a breathtaking manner. The world around me seemed to stop as I followed the trail of the Haggadah, a Jewish text that does exist and has a mysterious past of its own. Brooks poses a possible history of the book and brings to life the fictional people who had the book as a part of their worlds.

In some ways, this work differs from Brooks' other works in that it reads much like a "pageturner." Each chapter ends with a sentence that leaves you grasping for more, always on the edge of your seat. There is something about the pageturner that bothers me a bit: I don't know if it's the fact that it fits the layout of the Nancy Drew novels I read as a child and I feel that I surely must have grown into a new story structure, or if it's that I feel as if the author is trying to trick me into reading more. I want to say, "Did you really have to do that? Did you think I would put the book down otherwise?"

However, it was something I could forgive Brooks for because her writing is so damn good. And it wasn't just the writing. I am the kind of person who can be stunned by a good idea. I can appreciate the concept the author has created even if they ruin it with bad writing. But Geraldine Brooks has the writing skill to back up a unique idea. And these are the ingredients for my favorite kind of reading.
A final bit of the book that has stuck with me is a paragraph narrated by a young boy who has been given the job to create a portrait:

"It took me three days. I had stared at the old man, trying to see him as I had learned to see an unfamiliar plant, emptying my mind not just of all other plants I had painted before, but of all my assumptions about what a plant is--that it has a stem, that leaves come off at such and so an angle, that leaves, in fact, are green. Just so, I looked at the face of the butterfly man. I tried to see it as a pattern of light and dark, void and solid. I made a grid on the page in my mind and divided up his face as if each square of the grid was a separate thing, containing its unique information."

As an avid reader and an aspiring writer, I loved this description. It is how I strive to write. And I have a feeling that it is just how Brooks works as well.