Book: People of the book
Mar. 16th, 2010 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Geraldine Brooks
Verdict: People of the book is enjoyably trashy.
Reason for reading it: My parents read this for their book club and were talking about it. Although they mentioned that the real history was more interesting than the way the book fictionalized things, it was the kind of thing that I felt in the mood for.
How it came into my hands: Library
Details: (c) Geraldine Brooks 2008; Pub Harper Collins 2008; ISBN 978-0-00-717743-1
People of the book is sentimental and melodramatic, but enough of a story that I was drawn into it anyway. The format with tracing the fictional history of a real illuminated hagaddah is original enough to be fun, and I enjoyed the mix of contemporary novel with historical. The framing narrator, Hannah Heath, is not the most endearing character ever but I did care about her. The arc about her troubled relationship with her mother and her discoveries about her past would make a fairly decent trashy novel on its own, and breaking that up with the historical stuff detracts from its flaws.
The historical bits are completely over the top as well, with everything from a child dying of a head injury inflicted by a sniper, to people being tortured by the Inquisition and a dollop of Holocaust stuff thrown in for good measure. Brooks, who is a journalist, has done just enough research for the settings to feel superficially convincing, though the characters are anachronistic and I could spot inaccuracies even when I don't really know the bits of history or technology she's referring to. Apparentlyhatam_soferet, who does in fact work professionally with illuminated Hebrew manuscripts and writing with quill on parchment, was so disgusted by the misrepresentations that she threw the book across the room, but for me, PotB went some distance to capturing the feel of working in such an esoteric field even if the details were wrong.
The bit of melodrama that I couldn't really forgive was the closing scene where Hannah uncovers a fraud and saves the day; that just strayed into bad thriller territory for me and spoilt what plausibility the rest of the book might have had. I mean, it's true that anyone who managed to survive the Nazis or the Inquisition is likely to have had some pretty dramatic and heroic experiences, even if these particular incidents are made up. But the ending was just ridiculous.
The other problem with PotB is that it's weirdly racist. Not in the obvious way of making all the non-white people either evil or spear-carriers, but in the look at me I'm so liberal and unracist way. There is a long diatribe in the narrator's voice about how mixed race people are so beautiful and sexy and how they represent the happy peaceful future of humanity. The invented back story for the mysterious Black woman pictured in one of the illuminations (in the real hagaddah) portrays her as this amazing kick-ass Muslim lesbian feminist artistic genius Mary-Sueing her way through the 15th century. There is a completely random section about Indigenous Australian cultures and how rich and noble and wonderful they were, which really has to be shoehorned into a book about Mediaeval Europe and current day Bosnia. There are an awful lot of Muslims who (contrary to the stereotype! the narrative all but declares explicitly) are noble and cultured and heroic and paragons of religious tolerance. Obviously this is better than the kind of book which is full of offensive stereotypes, but it made me cringe.
I think most people I know are more likely to hate PotB than enjoy it, but it did scratch a particular reading itch for me.
Verdict: People of the book is enjoyably trashy.
Reason for reading it: My parents read this for their book club and were talking about it. Although they mentioned that the real history was more interesting than the way the book fictionalized things, it was the kind of thing that I felt in the mood for.
How it came into my hands: Library
Details: (c) Geraldine Brooks 2008; Pub Harper Collins 2008; ISBN 978-0-00-717743-1
People of the book is sentimental and melodramatic, but enough of a story that I was drawn into it anyway. The format with tracing the fictional history of a real illuminated hagaddah is original enough to be fun, and I enjoyed the mix of contemporary novel with historical. The framing narrator, Hannah Heath, is not the most endearing character ever but I did care about her. The arc about her troubled relationship with her mother and her discoveries about her past would make a fairly decent trashy novel on its own, and breaking that up with the historical stuff detracts from its flaws.
The historical bits are completely over the top as well, with everything from a child dying of a head injury inflicted by a sniper, to people being tortured by the Inquisition and a dollop of Holocaust stuff thrown in for good measure. Brooks, who is a journalist, has done just enough research for the settings to feel superficially convincing, though the characters are anachronistic and I could spot inaccuracies even when I don't really know the bits of history or technology she's referring to. Apparently
hatam_soferet, who does in fact work professionally with illuminated Hebrew manuscripts and writing with quill on parchment, was so disgusted by the misrepresentations that she threw the book across the room, but for me, PotB went some distance to capturing the feel of working in such an esoteric field even if the details were wrong.The bit of melodrama that I couldn't really forgive was the closing scene where Hannah uncovers a fraud and saves the day; that just strayed into bad thriller territory for me and spoilt what plausibility the rest of the book might have had. I mean, it's true that anyone who managed to survive the Nazis or the Inquisition is likely to have had some pretty dramatic and heroic experiences, even if these particular incidents are made up. But the ending was just ridiculous.
The other problem with PotB is that it's weirdly racist. Not in the obvious way of making all the non-white people either evil or spear-carriers, but in the look at me I'm so liberal and unracist way. There is a long diatribe in the narrator's voice about how mixed race people are so beautiful and sexy and how they represent the happy peaceful future of humanity. The invented back story for the mysterious Black woman pictured in one of the illuminations (in the real hagaddah) portrays her as this amazing kick-ass Muslim lesbian feminist artistic genius Mary-Sueing her way through the 15th century. There is a completely random section about Indigenous Australian cultures and how rich and noble and wonderful they were, which really has to be shoehorned into a book about Mediaeval Europe and current day Bosnia. There are an awful lot of Muslims who (contrary to the stereotype! the narrative all but declares explicitly) are noble and cultured and heroic and paragons of religious tolerance. Obviously this is better than the kind of book which is full of offensive stereotypes, but it made me cringe.
I think most people I know are more likely to hate PotB than enjoy it, but it did scratch a particular reading itch for me.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-22 09:32 am (UTC)Ouch :) I occasionally feel the same way about books where I have specialised domain knowledge[1], even occasionally ones where they scratched an itch really well, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. Obviously some books are accurate in detail, and some books give the right feel even if they're awful, but I'm not sure how to accept books that exactly fulfil my fantasies, especially subtly.
Asimov's Foundation is great propaganda for "heroic scientists understand things and are better than everyone else" even though the details are lamentably false, but I don't have a problem with it becasue I'm (mostly) happy with the moral. Whereas "Lord of Light" seems to have a message something like "some people are just better than the unwashed masses, and the most liberal one of them is really cool" which many fantasy books share, and definitely appeals to my sense of intellectual elitism, but ever since I thought to describe it like that has made me uncomfortable. Of course, I'm always embarrassed to admit a book scratches a particular itch at all, because I'm embarrassed to admit my mind has subjective emotional needs in its stories at all, let alone uncomfortable ones.
Of course, if you can write a review identifying WHAT appealed to you about a book, it is a very useful review because "people who like X will think it's awesome and other people may not" is much more objectively useful than "I thought it was awesome and I can't explain why and people can self-select until only people who agree with most of my biases listen to my reviews[2]"
[1] Sometimes including "commonsense knowledge of human nature"
[2] I've quoted this before, but one poor friend and I have always sucked at choosing books for each other. I feel like I at least made an _effort_ to take into account the sort of things he liked, though he may disagree, but we kept having conversations like (heavily fictionalised in my favour):
Him: Oh, you'll love [eg. Angels and Demons], really you will!
Me: But I didnd't like Da Vince Code.
Him: But this is much better!
Me: Do you mean "it's objectively better, including improving the things I perceieve as flaws" or "it does all of the same things the first book did that you liked and I didn't, but more so"?