The Books of Jacob: A Novel

"Olga Tokarczuk’s propulsive doorstopper affirms heresy as a vital cure to all forms of oppression. Set in 18th century Poland among landmarks that overlap with modern-day Ukraine, the Nobel laureate’s mesmerizing epic – via a sublime translation by Jennifer Croft – celebrates mysteries and contradictions, as embodied by Jacob, a false prophet whose adopted surname Frank evokes both kinship and stranger. Spanning decades of socio-political upheavals that preceded the disappearance of Poland from the world map for 123 years due to its partitions by Russia and other neighboring empires, the novel unspools a breathtaking vista that evokes a sense of teeming otherness at the heart of the Enlightenment."

"Unlike Heaven , this book is attempting to embrace an entire world and culture, a particular period in Poland and Eastern Europe, and fold it into everything that can be known. It is a maximalist novel in that sense. There’s the theology of it, but also how market garden towns worked, how peasants lived, what beliefs people had and how those were challenged or changed. Both The Books of Jacob and A New Name are dealing with the numinous, a sense of God. But Jacob Frank is an apostate, he’s someone who is prepared to overturn centuries of his own religion in an attempt to create something new. Thanks to Olga—through Jenny—we get to witness this vast pageant of what it means to have lived through that time in Poland. It’s like a very, very large Bayeux Tapestry. But also, what it is to look back on that, given what we know now, because there are outside observers. One common character in The Books of Jacob is Yenta, who should have been long dead by the end of the book, but is still a sort of ghostly presence in a cave at the end of the Second World War. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So when you spoke about comparison, no, we’re not really comparing the shortlisted books, because books do not strive to do the same thing, and the tools they use can be hugely different. I mean, there is an extraordinary erudition and a vast amount of research in The Books of Jacob and Tomb of Sand which are neither present or necessary in Heaven or Elena Knows . But that doesn’t make it a better book. What makes these great books is the experience of being caught up in reading, how the reader responds to the characters, and also how they are written. The Books of Jacob is a panopticon, an epic whereas Heaven and Elena Knows take place over a short period and are bounded by a small number of characters; two in the case of Heaven , and in Elena Knows , by one."

"Olga Tokarczuk’s masterpiece The Books of Jacob , which was specifically cited when she won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature , will finally reach the United States. It’s translated by the American author and critic Jennifer Croft, who also translated Tokarczuk’s International Booker Prize-winning Flights . The Books of Jacob —published in the original Polish in 2014—is a thousand-page tome on the life of Jacob Frank, a self-proclaimed messiah in 18th century Poland who declared his followers exempt from moral laws, and encouraged them to break all forms of religious and sexual taboos. It is, inarguably, a daunting prospect, but it’s a worthy reading project for dark winter evenings. The Guardian called it “dense, captivating and weird…a visionary novel that conforms to a particular notion of masterpiece—long, arcane and sometimes inhospitable.” Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Also of note: one of Denmark’s most celebrated writers, Tove Ditlevsen ( The Copenhagen Trilogy ) will publish The Faces , a portrait of one woman’s slide into mental illness (26 Jan); Fernanda Melchor, author of the multi-award-winning Hurricane Season , will publish another work of brutal, torrential prose, Paradais (March 22); and one of my favourite discoveries of last year, Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century , which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, will arrive in the US—an eerie translation by Martin Aitken will be available from 1 Feb."