Motion is perpetual, too, in The Books of Jacob, and some of that earlier novel’s references, images, characters, and aleatory, mosaicked style have made their way into this one. Its Polish title is Bieguni, the name of a sect of “Old Believers” who professed that salvation lay in constant motion. Tokarczuk is best-known in the English-speaking world for her novel Flights (published in Polish in 2007, and in English in 2017), which won her, and Croft, the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
The Frankists, a polyglottal lot from the territories that are now Poland, Romania, Hungary, Turkey, and the surrounds, follow their Messiah through his brief conversion to Islam and then more emphatic conversion to Catholicism, which leads to the mass baptism of thousands of Jews in Poland. It follows the charismatic leader and his flock, their enemies and benefactors, and sundry other characters in their orbit as they rove through a politically and culturally shapeshifting Central-East Europe in search of salvation during the apocalyptic second half of the eighteenth century.
The Books of Jacob is in some ways about the infinite possibilities of language itself-how words can make worlds, and also violently undo them-but at the level of plot, it is, in the simplest, most reductive explanation, a fictionalized account of a real man, Jakub Leybowicz, alias Jacob Frank, around whom was built an occultist sect of Judaism. Jennifer Croft’s dazzling translation of this staggering, thousand-page metatextual novel, with its symphonic composition of linguistic registers, into the confines of English is a superhuman feat. The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft, Riverhead Books, 960 pages, $ 35Ī breathtaking gale of languages, alive and dead, gusts throughout Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, first published in Poland in 2014 and now finally available in the US.
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