Geraldine Brooks is a great writer whom I have just recently discovered. Her book, a fiction story about a young lady who restores and studies ancient texts, an expert who is following the tracks of the Sarajevo Hagaddah was a great read and has made me think about many many things. It combines both adventure, history and investigative writing and story telling
Geraldine Brooks is Australian born and a Pulitzer Prize winning author as well. Our author of the month at noonyabooks.com in March 2012 and one of the best authors in recent times was from Australia too; maybe Australia is bringing more good stories to the market or just producing better authors, I dont know .Something which the Ms Brooks may likely have known when she wrote but may not have fully realized is the impact that she and other good writers have on many lives. . A great writer's gift or skill, is that characters come to life before your very eyes and mind and the questions they bring to the screen of your mind stay with you for a very long time. Right now, living in Uganda, I have feel i have visited post war Bosnia and have a tiny bit more understanding of the place and times. I value more, the archivists and restorers and the people who do it. My abhorrence for war is even stronger.
I can remember reading the war novel "The Passing Bells" by Philip Rock about a family and their trials and tribulations around the time of World War 1. Another book that struck my mind was How Green Was my Valley, a 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn. I read these books more than fifteen years ago as a young undergraduate. In my mind, I still see the images the two writers described. I see the coal blackened faces in the once green Valley, I think about the carpenter who said he would never make coffins whenever i pass a coffin shop in my country Uganda where coffins are displayed on the roadside. From Llewellyns's book, I took the lesson of the need for a quietness around areas of intimacy in the two loving people who never married because of the too early exposure of their afair to others.
When i think about war, i always remember the "Passing Bells" and the unlikely death of the nurse heroine who was the beloved of the main journalist protagonist. I could still cry like I did then at the sadness of it all when i see the TV pictures in Egypt and in modern Syria where children, nurses and mothers and fathers are dying,in war. Some books are just timeless.
From my reading of it, "The People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks will probably be one of those classics twenty years from now. I hope as many people or more read it but should they not, the writer has still left an indelible mark on civilization as i know it and for that I the reader am grateful. Please go read that book or borrow it from a library.
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| Author Geraldine Brooks |
I have to go see the Sarajevo Haggadah online now as well, lots to do.
Till then,
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