'The Books of Jacob,' a Nobel Prize Winner's Sophisticated and Overwhelming Novel

[Celerity]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/books/review-books-of-jacob-olga-tokarczuk.html



The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk was, in 2019, a youthful winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was 57, dreadlocked, mischievous of politics, a vegetarian. Her novel “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” had recently been turned, by Agnieszka Holland, into the film “Spoor,” a slice of existential and ecology-minded dread.

Tokarczuk (pronounced To-KAR-chook) was not among those laureates the Swedish Academy sometimes seems to prop up in the crypt for a final viewing. Her career was, and is, in full gallop. Her novels — they are often both pensive and mythic in tone — are slowly making their way into English. In addition to “Drive Your Plow,” these include the philosophical and often dazzling “Flights,” about travel and being between stations. It won the 2018 Man Booker International prize.

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. It’s here now. At nearly 1,000 pages, it is indeed magnum-size. Even its subtitle (rare, on a novel) is a mouthful. The first third reads: “A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages and three major religions, not counting the minor sects.”

If you sense you are about to step into a sword-and-sandal epic with a mud room, you would not be altogether wrong. If you detect a saving, dill-scented note of satire, you would not be wrong either. 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.

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