There are misanthropic doctors and bishops with gambling debts. There are plagiarism scandals and the cutting of difficult toenails. This enormous novel makes space for a landslide of incident and commentary. She views the action as if from atop a minaret and serves, as Tokarczuk semi-jokingly put it in an interview, as a kind of “fourth-person narrator.” Then there’s Yente, an elderly woman, on the edge of death, who swallows an amulet and becomes essentially immortal. Awkwardly, Nahman’s wife and Jacob despise each other. One is Nahman, a rabbi who becomes Jacob’s Boswell. Two supporting characters are particularly important.
There are serried ranks of wives and lovers and misfits and buttinskies and assorted hangers-on. Multiple other characters spin in orbit around him.
Tokarczuk hews closely to the twists and turns of Frank’s fate as he converts to Islam and then to Catholicism and, along the way, becomes a proto-Zionist. Set in the mid-18th century, “The Books of Jacob” is about a charismatic self-proclaimed messiah, Jacob Frank, a young Jew who travels through the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, attracting and repelling crowds and authorities in equal measure.įrank is based on a real historical figure the author has clearly done her research. If you detect a saving, dill-scented note of satire, you would not be wrong either. If you sense you are about to step into a sword-and-sandal epic with a mud room, you would not be altogether wrong. The first third reads: “A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages and three major religions, not counting the minor sects.” At nearly 1,000 pages, it is indeed magnum-size.Įven its subtitle (rare, on a novel) is a mouthful. Tokarczuk’s most ambitious novel - the Swedish Academy called it her “magnum opus” - has long been said to be “The Books of Jacob,” first published in Poland in 2014.
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