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the complete review - fiction

The Books of Jacob

by
Olga Tokarczuk

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : monumental, though its central figure remains elusive

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Big, wide-ranging, detailed; not quite a consensus on how successful it all is

  From the Reviews:

• "(A) wild, unruly beast -- not just because it is more than 900 pages long. (...) The Books of Jacob conjures up a society flooded with the new thinking that emerged from the Enlightenment and the French revolution. Its central question -- the answer to which remains tantalisingly out of reach -- is why people believe in the likes of Frank. In the living, breathing, mysterious world he and his followers inhabit, Ms Tokarczuk shows how ideas, along with fables, myths and delusions, made the society in which he flourished, which in turn led to the world of today. Jennifer Croft's translation brilliantly captures the onward rush of Ms Tokarczuk's writing." - The Economist
  
  
• "So outlandish and outrageously implausible is the story Tokarczuk tells that the novel strains at the limits of credibility. (...) The Books of Jacob is an amalgam of vignettes and voices, histories and fragments, maps and illustrations. (...) Charismatic and with more than a dash of psychopathy, Frank is an endlessly fascinating character study, and it is easy to see why he is deserving of such generous novelistic treatment. (...) For all its forbidding weight, the writing remains fluid and engaging, often poetic. None of this, it must be said, could have been possible without the Herculean efforts of Tokarczuk’s translator. A text as thorny and arcane as this could easily become overwrought and leaden in translation; anglophone readers ought to be especially grateful to Croft, who handles Tokarczuk’s writing with the deft touch of an expert, and pulls off the almost miraculous feat of recreating a text in which, amid the English, words of Polish, Hebrew, Latin and Turkish jostle against one another naturally." - Bryan Karetnyk, Financial Times
  
  
• "Over a thousand pages long, dense with history and incident, it is vast enough to make this reader’s knees buckle. As crowded as a Bruegel painting, it moves from mud-bound Galician villages to Greek monasteries, 18th-century Warsaw, Brno, Vienna and the luxurious surroundings of the Habsburg court. It takes in esoteric theological arguments, diplomatic history, alchemy, Kabbalah, Polish antisemitism and the philosophical roots of the Enlightenment. It is a dauntingly ambitious piece of work and one of the responses it arouses is just plain amazement at the patience and tenacity that have gone into its construction. (...) Dense, captivating and weird (.....) It is a visionary novel that conforms to a particular notion of masterpiece -- long, arcane and sometimes inhospitable. (...) The Books of Jacob is a patchwork of scenes and voices, tableaux and fragments, interpolations from Jacob’s followers, pictures and maps from contemporary documents." - Marcel Theroux, The Guardian
  
  
• "What is important here is that Olga Tokarczuk has learned to do the impossible: to write the novel of the collective." - Fredric Jameson, London Review of Books
  
  
• "Ultimately, then, the story is not about the apocalypse but assimilation and the transition to modernity. (...) Yes, there’s a miracle in these pages. It’s not about the Virgin Mary or the false Messiah Jacob Frank, however, but the way Tokarczuk can make a period so distant from us in every way feel so completely alive. In an era of cynicism about both spirituality and the capabilities of written fiction, that might be miracle enough." - Randy Rosenthal, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Tokarczuk, who trained as a psychologist, suspends judgement. Indeed, parts of the novel read like case studies, written from different perspectives, of a patient with extreme mental health problems. (...) The novel contains some spellbinding scenes. (...) The Books of Jacob is a vast mosaic, exhaustive and a little exhausting. It is also dense and arcane, like a Holy Book. (...) The problem with The Books of Jacob is that its amassed information overshadows its creativity. (...) The prose often feels flat, too much like reportage. With seemingly hundreds of characters (and no dramatis personae) it’s as overpopulated as it is overloaded. The more the novel proliferates, the less it penetrates." - Johanna Thomas-Corr, New Statesman
  
  
• "The Books of Jacob is an unruly, overwhelming, vastly eccentric novel. It’s sophisticated and ribald and brimming with folk wit. It treats everything it bumps into at both face value and ad absurdum. It’s Chaucerian in its brio. (...) This enormous novel makes space for a landslide of incident and commentary. (...) This novel’s density is saturnalian; its satire nimble; academics will tug at its themes, as if they were pinworms, for decades. The author’s enthusiasm never flags, even when a reader’s does. She bulldozes the sprawl forward. Yet the characters remain at a distance. The Books of Jacob rarely touches the emotions. No page, for me, turned itself. (...) I don’t mean to dissuade. As with certain operas, I’m glad to have had the experience -- and equally glad that it’s over." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times
  
  
• "Tokarczuk sticks close to the historical record, but fills its gaps with made-up characters and charges the atmosphere with the daemonic energy of Jewish folk magic and a sense that God lurks nearby. (...) She passes the narrative baton from character to character in a thrilling relay of perspectives, and avails herself of diaries, letters, poetry, prophecies, and parables, as well as traditional narrative, as they suit her needs. (...) This is a novel that affirms life while exploring the nihilistic disregard for its unglamorous fundamentals. Indeed, the power and beauty of Tokarczuk’s writing, which shine through Jennifer Croft’s ebullient translation, lie, in part, in how tenderly she recreates the material as well as psychic reality of the actors in this strange, implausible drama, making them substantial, sympathetic, impossible to dismiss." - Judith Shulevitz, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "It reads like the wildest invention, yet isn’t, and while the novel’s absence of authorial hand-holding can be taxing, more challenging still is its vast sweep, as characters drift in and out of focus over the action’s 50-year span. Most destabilising of all is the passivity of the book’s voice, a kind of undeviating poker face that leaves judgment and intent radically open to interpretation. Tokarczuk tells the story with a sufficiently light touch that you’re left unsure whether Frank was a radical thinker, whose doctrinal provocations were of epochal significance, or simply a con artist whose tricks got wildly out of hand." - Anthony Cummins, The Observer
  
  
• "(T)here is a multitude of characters in this voluminous book, an abundance of stories and parables, and the apocryphal tradition is prevalent. Olga Tokarczuk rewrites history to evoke what has been lost in Polish culture -- its Jewish aspect -- and to ask, as any founding text must, about the nature of human beings, the meaning of suffering, and the existence or non-existence of God" - Ania Ready, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "The novel is a tapestry of different perspectives, delivered mostly in the third person but also through letters, speeches and first-person chronicles and musings. (...) The swift intercutting of these voices and vantage points supplies the narrative with pace, variety and flashes of humour. It also sustains its richness and mystery. (...) Despite the book’s meandering storyline, which follows the many twists of Frankism’s history, The Books of Jacob is gripping and suspenseful. Its page numbering runs in reverse, counting us down with messianic expectancy. The novel also pulses with philosophical energy. (...) The novel’s central narrative is conveyed in unfussy, pellucid prose, which brims with detail while maintaining an energetic pace. Its varied voices are rendered distinctly." - Adam Sutcliffe, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "(I)t’s just the kind of dense, monumental work that could help the Swedish Academy restore its rather tattered reputation as an arbiter of serious literature. (...) It makes for an incredibly juicy tale of villainy and intrigue, yet the striking thing about The Books of Jacob is that Ms. Tokarczuk has taken advantage of almost none of the story’s inherent drama. (...) In Jennifer Croft’s translation -- a feat of tremendous diligence and care -- the prose remains urbane and unruffled whether it describes religious ecstasy or sickening violence. On the practical level, this makes reading the novel extremely slow going, as there is no momentum or catharsis and little emotional involvement with the characters" - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
  
  
• "(I)t’s just as awe-inspiring as the Nobel judges claimed when they praised Tokarczuk for showing “the supreme capacity of the novel to represent a case almost beyond human understanding.” In terms of its scope and ambition, The Books of Jacob is beyond anything else I’ve ever read. (...) (A)s daunting as it sounds, The Books of Jacob is miraculously entertaining and consistently fascinating. Despite his best efforts, Frank never mastered alchemy, but Tokarczuk certainly has. Her light irony, delightfully conveyed by Croft’s translation, infuses many of the sections. What’s more, it turns out that the story of an 18th-century grifter inflated by Messianic delusions is surprisingly relevant to our own era." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Tokarczuk covers all the calamities of the era -- pogroms, war, abject poverty -- but pays mind-bogglingly detailed attention to everyday spectacles (.....) This colossal book is a truly bewitching account of untold fissures in history, minor religions, little lives, and splinterings-off. It is rich, strange, astonishing in scope, and delightfully enigmatic" - Hannah Weber, World Literature Today

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Jacob of the title is Jacob Frank, an eighteenth-century historical figure, born as Yankiele Leybowicz but adopting the name of 'Jacob Frank', author Olga Tokarczuk suggesting:

Frank, or Frenk, means foreign. Nahman knows Jacob likes this -- being foreign is a quality of those who have frequently changed their place of residence. He's told Nahman that he feels best in new places, because it is as if the world begins afresh every time. To be foreign is to be free.

     "Yente ? " she asks quietly. "You alive ?"
     But what is Yente supposed to say to that ? Is that even the right question ?

     Eva, who is sitting in a deep armchair and playing with the tassels of the curtain, can just make out the voice of her father from the living room, who is telling the story in an animated way of how he was released by the Russians. She hears him embellishing the events, perhaps even lying about them. In his version, it all sounds very dramatic, and he comes off as a hero -- an attack, shots, the old soldiers dying, blood, monks covered in debris. In reality, it was all much less theatrical.

     Jacob never talks like the tzaddikim do, in long, complicated sentences brimming with rare and precious words, always harking back to quotes from the Scriptures. He speaks concisely and clearly, like someone who earns his living at the market or drives a cart.

Words come and go. A person's got to have an army. We, too, must act, and not just speak. Did our forefathers not chatter, nor pore over written words enough ? What did all that talking do for them ? What came of it ? It's better to see with your eyes than write down a bunch of words.

     It's hard to grasp what's going on when you are reading in Polish. As a language, it's quite strange.

     Nahman's stories are not always to be believed -- even less so when he writes them down. He has a propensity for exaggeration. He detects signs in everything; in everything he seeks and finds connections. What happens is never quite enough for Nahman -- he wants what happens also to have some heavenly, definitive meaning.

But do not get too attached to your new names. Nor to the country, nor to the language, although you have to speak it. Names must come before nations do; the sound that creates them corresponds to a certain accord of the universe. That is your real name. The names we carry on the street, on the other hand, around the market, traveling in a carriage on a muddy road, or those others use to call us -- all that is just tacked on. Those names are useful like the clothing you put on to go to work. They come and go, like anything. Here one minute, gone the next.

Jacob always says: No traces, keep everything a perfect secret, no one can find out who we are and what we do. Even though he actually makes quite the ruckus, with his strange gestures and the odd things that come out of his mouth. He speaks so enigmatically that it's hard to figure out what he means. That's why people stay together for a long time after he leaves, trying to interpret for themselves and one another the words of this Frank, this foreigner. What did he say ? In some sense, each can only understand it all as best he can, in his own way.

- M.A.Orthofer, 23 January 2022

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Links:

• Riverhead Books publicity page
• Fitzcarraldo Editions publicity page
• Text Publishing publicity page
• Wydawnictwo Literackie publicity page
• Noir sur Blanc publicity page
• Le Livre de Poche publicity page
• Kampa Verlag publicity page
• How I wrote The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
• Q & A with Olga Tokarczuk
• The Order of Things: Jennifer Croft on Translating Olga Tokarczuk

• Asymptote
• The Bobsphere
• Book'ing (French)
• Bookmunch
• Boston Globe
• Boston Review
• buzz
• The Calvert Journal
• Charybde 27 : le Blog (French)
• Cosmopolitan Review
• Culture.pl
• Deutschlandfunk (German)
• Deutschlandfunk Kultur (German)
• Le Devoir (French)
• Études (French)
• 4Columns
• Frankfurter Rundschau (German)
• The Guardian
• Hadassah
• Kirkus Reviews
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• The Los Angeles Times
• Lucy Writers
• The Modern Novel
• Mon coin lecture (French)
• The Monthly
• New Statesman
• The Observer
• The Onion
• Pile by the Bed
• Prospect
• Publishers Weekly
• Shelf Awareness
• Der Standard (German)
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Tablet
• Der Tagesspiegel (German)
• Tony's Reading List
• Toronto Star
• La viduité (French)
• The Washington Post
• World Literature Today

• Nobel Prize in Literature, 2018

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

• See Index of Eastern European literature
• See Index of Real People in Works of Fiction
• See Index of Books by Nobel laureates under review

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About the Author:

       Polish author Olga Tokarczuk was born in 1962. She was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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© 2022 the complete review

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