To be foreign is to be free.”īut Tokarczuk is also careful to show the dark side of this freedom, what is lost and what is gained. Jacob describes himself to a follower as someone who “feels best in new places, because it is as if the world begins afresh every time. Languages twist and brush up against one another as characters learn and communicate in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German, and more-translation being a common theme. Names change repeatedly, especially once Jacob and his followers convert to Catholicism and adopt Polish names. Charts, book pages, and paintings from the time period crop up frequently as illustrations, and this fluidity in form is echoed in the book’s approach toward identity. Its page numbers run backwards, which is “a nod to books written in Hebrew,” Tokarczuk explains in a note at the end of the book, “as well as a reminder that every order, every system, is simply a matter of what you’ve gotten used to.” Like her earlier novels, the story is told in a series of vignettes, some from the perspectives of Jacob’s followers and others via a detached third person.

The Books of Jacob, which was specifically lauded by the Nobel committee upon rewarding Tokarczuk the prize for literature in 2018, is undoubtedly the author’s magnum opus: a near 1000-page, deeply researched novel that aims to destroy any notions of linearity.

In Tokarczuk’s account (and Jennifer Croft’s elegant English translation from the Polish), Jacob is at once a charismatic con man and a living embodiment of the contradictions implicit within historical narrative. Who is Jacob Frank? Born Yankiele Leybowicz, the central character of Olga Tokarczuk’s panoramic The Books of Jacobis based on a real-life historical figure, a Jewish man in eighteenth-century Poland who proclaimed himself to be the Messiah and founded the heretical Frankist sect, which mixed Kabbalist mysticism with a belief in the Trinity. Le Petit Dé Frederic TutenĪ Playwright in Paris Brings the Revolution Onstage by Chris Knapp Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacobby Rhian Sasseen Payal Kapadia's A Night of Knowing Nothingby Arun A.K.Ĭandice Hoyes's Blue Lagoon Womanby Jasmine Dreame Wagner Nicole Rudick's What Is Now Known Was Only Once Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalleby Bruce LaBruce

The books of jacob book review