The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk

The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

Translated by Jennifer Croft

Riverhead Books 2022

Yes, it’s late to be reviewing a novel published nine months ago but maybe not too late to identify a literary injustice. Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob was published in Polish in 2014 and was cited by the Nobel Prize committee in her award in 2018. When published in English, the novel received many rave reviews in both England and America, and The Books of Jacob was on the National Book Awards long list this year for translated literature. A few days ago the NBA left Tokarczuk off its short list, prompting this belated notice and small remedy.

Set in 18th century middle Europe and clocking in at well over 900 pages with a cast of hundreds, The Books of Jacob is a monsterpiece and, perhaps, a masterpiece. “Monstrous” because of its size, its deformation of narrative conventions, and its relation to the etymology of “monster”: warning. The Jacob of Tokarczuk’s title is Jacob Frank, an historical character born in 1726—a Polish Jewish mystic who became a Muslim, then a Catholic, then a monster like more recent “sacred” leaders who became self-serving tyrants. Early reviewers struggling to describe the plot complications and formal excesses of the novel paid little attention to the warning element of the book. The 19th century German sociologist Max Weber described the “routinization of charisma” in modern organizations and bureaucracies, but since Weber’s time charismatic figures as different as Hitler, Jim Jones, Kim Jong Un, and Donald Trump have wreaked havoc. Although the pre-Enlightenment world of the novel will seem alien—partly because of Tokarczuk’s obsession with theological and quotidian detail—a bogged reader can push though by recognizing the novel as a distant mirror of seductive and destructive charisma.

What is now Poland is the perfect setting for a boundary- crossing novel, for the boundaries of Poland have been constantly changing since the 18th century. Characters wander across states that no longer exist or exist now within different countries. Tokarczuk’s plot wanders along with Frank’s movements. He lives for a time in Turkey, gathers followers, moves back to Poland, recruits more followers, spends more than a decade in a Polish prison, is released by invading Russians, and sets up a court in what is now Austria. While Tokarczuk may not have been aware of the word “bounder,” her Jacob fits the bill, an immoral man, particularly in his relations with women. In fact, Jacob’s radical theology demands immorality, the reversal of Mosaic and Christian laws, especially those governing sex. He directs his followers to have intercourse with those not their spouses, and he has something like a harem of concubines. His cultists tolerate his destruction of family bonds because of Frank’s magnetism and his not quite explicit promise that his loyalists shall live forever. They don’t, but the novel has something like a happy ending. Before Frank’s death, his patriarchal power wanes and women fill the void left by the monster/master.

Geographical and moral boundary crossings have their analogues in Tokarczuk’s quick shifting among genres and styles: anecdotes, journals, dreams, travelogues, songs, and more. There are seven “books” within the novel, and sections within these books are rarely more than four pages long. Some are about Jacob. More are about or narrated by his followers, not just their relation to him but their relations to their families, their homes, their clothing, their food, their language, their changing names. As a fragmented “encyclopedic novel,” The Books of Jacob can be compared—for American readers--to two huge American historical novels set in 20th century middle Europe—Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Vollmann’s Europe Central. And yet Tokarczuk’s variousness of styles, as well as her inclusions of visual materials, is more like Le Guin’s spirit-filled anthropological fiction, Always Coming Home. Like Le Guin, Tokarczuk has a figure—Jacob’s grandmother Yente—who sees all from something like an angelic position outside of death. An intelligence described as “someone tenderly observing” (126) characters’ lives, Yente is a stand-in for the novelist whose Nobel acceptance speech asked for more tenderness from fiction writers.

Most of Tokarczuk’s Jewish and Christian characters obsess about judgment, but she almost never explicitly judges her characters, even Jacob when he is beyond the boundary of sense and sympathy. Perhaps because there is a side of Tokarczuk that resembles Jacob, his ambition to destroy old values and to synthesize new ones, his insistence on his followers’ (readers’) attention to his unlikely and difficult stories. The difference: Jacob is interested only in his most faithful and useful followers while Tokarczuk attends to them and to some sceptics in the novel: a priest named Chmielowski who is compiling a secular encylopedia, a physician named Rubin who debunks mystic cures, Antoni Kossakowski, a fabulist who lies even more than Jacob. There are two literary and sympathetic noblewomen in the novel, and Jacob’s daughter Eva acquires substance near the end, and of course there is Yente, but despite all the sympathies that Tokarczuk displays for these figures The Books of Jacob is, like the books of the Bible, a male-dominated compendium.

Is it too late to confess that I admire an art of excess such as Pynchon’s and Vollmann’s and long, overdone novels by Gayl Jones and David Foster Wallace? Like Jacob to both Jews and Christians, these novels challenge me, rearrange my intellectual landscape, furnish a useful, occasional alternative to books read in one sitting. Challenge can be frustrating, and I believe Tokarczuk sometimes suffers from graduate student dissertation disease, including in her book information she discovered in her research that could have been left out. Not so much information about daily life as arcane theological theories and disputes. She also often uses letters between characters to convey information. I know the epistolary novel was popular in the 18th century, but the formality of the correspondence sucks life from The Books of Jacob. A reviewer for a Jewish publication, The Tablet, said “A Polish Christian writes the great Jewish novel.” If so, she has done it while living in a country ruled by a Christian right-wing government that has passed laws forbidding frank (pun intended) discussions of the Holocaust. Yente and Tokarczuk are not ranting Cassandras, but The Books of Jacob is, I will repeat, a warning about both charismatic and bureaucratic orthodoxy. In 2013 the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in a jagged postmodern building in Warsaw. The Books of Jacob is a worthy portable companion to that monument of memory.

—Tom LeClair Author of "Harpooning Donald Trump: A Novelist's Essays," published by Mediacs and available at Amazon.