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Feb 04, 2018dnk rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
The story centers on Hanna, the book conservationist who arrives in Bosnia to restore the book in 1996, and those who helped create the book intertwine and unfold backwards. Hanna, like Bosnia, like much of the world, is emotionally worn from an unloving childhood and even as an adult struggles with her mother. She finds out that she is not just studying the book but also aspects of herself; she is very much like the neurosurgeon mother she wars with, who claims that she doesn't just save lives, she saves souls. So, too, does Hanna- she doesn't just save things, she traces its story so that the creators as well as the creations may live on. We come into the story- even the book- knowing that for all of the race-baiting hatred fomented over hundreds of years, many areas of the world lived in relative tolerance for long stretches of time, and it was during these periods that beautiful and learned creations were made possible. The accidents or "flaws" in the book help tell that human story, all of the chapters laced with varying degrees of the desire to illuminate the world with something better when even mere survival is not guaranteed. Zahra, the Muslim woman who is sold into slavery but becomes a magnificent artist in the employ of an emir and later uses her art to open the world to a deaf-mute boy; Ruth, the secret scholar in Spain of 1492 who manages to salvage not only her father's final piece of work in the haggadah but also her nephew despite the Inquisition and the Explulsion Order; the priest Vistorini and his friend/nemesis rabbi Aryeh of Venice who are united in their temptations, desperations, love of learning and, though unacknowledged, their past; the Jewish-Viennese doctor who is trying to make sense of the decaying world he lives in, symbolized by his growing list of patients who are literally rotting from the inside out with syphilis, including a desperate book-binder who falls back onto anti-Semitism to explain why his world is slipping away; Serif Kamal, the learned man of languages and books who risks his life to save not only books but people from the teeth of the Nazis; Lola, the poor, uneducated Jewish girl who loses everything not once but twice but lives to restore the book to it's rightful place; and Ozren Karaman, who risks his life to save the book for the future of his war-torn city even while the city destroys his family. All of the historical characters jump off the page and demanded that I hear and understand their stories. I couldn't put it down until I had done so. It was, then, with disappointment that I returned to the present-day character of Hanna. Compared to the people whose stories she (partially) uncovered, Hanna seemed emotionally immature and oddly unsympathetic. These characters were holding their breath and walking a tightrope to survive without compromising all of their values. A woman of both means and education who was simply *unhappy* was a let down, and the happy ending at the end was unsatisfying.