Olga Tokarczuk has long been recognized in Poland as one of the most important authors working today, but it is only in the last few years that she has received her due recognition in the English-speaking world. The course of her rise to fame in English has been in some ways unexpected, beginning as it did with one of her more experimental fictions, Flights, which is also among her longer works. Although this seems to bode well for her continued success, it is in some ways unfortunate that Flights was the first of her novels to receive such attention, because it may give readers the wrong impression: Tokarczuk’s work, though ambitious and wonderfully complex, is in fact best characterized by an extraordinary vivacity and approachability.
That this grace and elegance can also be appreciated by Anglophone readers is due, in part, to the brilliance of Tokarczuk’s translators, and the particular genius of Jennifer Croft is once again on display in The Books of Jacob. Croft beautifully captures the distinct quality of Tokarczuk’s prose: the lightness, the playful curiosity, the lyricism. This is harder than one might think: I translated a few lines of The Books of Jacob myself for an academic essay I wrote on the novel, and it is humbling to compare my version to hers. As Croft recently explained in an essay on the process of translating the novel, part of the trick is managing word order, a complex phenomenon in Polish that, if rendered too faithfully in English, makes for an awkwardness that is utterly alien to Tokarczuk’s style. To get her right, it is necessary to take some liberties, and it requires a truly gifted translator to find the right balance.
A big part of what distinguishes Tokarczuk’s work is its spell-binding immersiveness. Many of her novels, like the much earlier Primeval and Other Times and House of Day, House of Night, have a fairy-tale quality (one that has much in common with the works of magical realism so popular in the 1990s), produced in part by her fondness for interweaving notes of magic or mysticism but also more generally by her narrators’ sense of wide-eyed wonder at the world. The Books of Jacob is very characteristic in this regard, particularly in its interest in the occult and otherworldly. At the opening of the novel, we meet Yente as she awakens on her deathbed and suddenly floats above the scene, viewing everything from on high. “And this is how it is now, how it will be: Yente sees all.” And so the story begins, establishing a perspective that hovers between life and death, outside of time and space, a striking combination of detachment and sensuous detail. At one moment, it ponders the conventions of geographical borders; at another, it notes the particular scent of a sweaty body.
But against expectation, Yente is not the novel’s narrator, nor even the book’s focal point, though she reappears occasionally to survey the scene and meditate on the vagaries of human designs and plans. Instead, the novel moves among a sprawling cast of characters, each with their own wonderfully idiosyncratic set of concerns and interests. There are the various members of the Shorr family (it is they who inadvertently make Yente immortal, having attempted only to keep her alive long enough that her death wouldn’t ruin ruin the wedding they are hosting.) There is the priest and encyclopedia author Benedict Chmielowski, who dreams of describing the entire world, and his pen-pal and aspiring poet, the noblewoman Elżbieta Drużbacka. There is the doctor Asher Rubin, whose cosmopolitan interests in European culture and philosophy draw him gradually away from the Jewish community. And one of my personal favorites, Moliwda, a lonely, wandering Polish nobleman who moves to Turkey, giving himself over to various utopian experiments in search of a place where he will belong. From these bits and pieces of the various characters’ lives, gradually, a larger story emerges.
A story of what? As is often the case with Tokarczuk’s fiction, one wants to say that it is a story about the world itself, about the nature of reality, about history, about the writing of literature. But more specifically, the novel orbits the character of Jacob Frank (a real historical figure), an eighteenth-century religious leader and mystic whose devotees, the Frankists, believed him to be the Messiah. At his urging, hundreds of his Jewish followers chose to be baptized and live as Christians. Frank himself was also baptized, with the King of Poland serving as his godfather, but this frail alliance with the Polish nobility became increasingly tenuous as Frank’s popularity grew and the Catholic Church came to perceive his views as heretical, particularly as rumors of his sexual exploits spread. We watch Jacob’s star rise, witnessing his incredible charisma, the dangerous and alluring flashes of brilliance and humor, and the growing devotion—and unease—that he inspires among those around him.
Is this, then, the story of a prophet or a cult leader, a charlatan? The novel dances tantalizingly around this question, becoming an extended meditation on the nature of history that dazzlingly blends fact, fiction, and fantasy—and showing us how history itself always combines these elements, often at a terrible human cost. Although this novel is deeply rooted in the intricacies of Poland’s past, particularly the troubled relationship between Jews and Catholics, its thoughtful portrayal of the diverse and multicultural milieu of the eighteenth century is a forceful rejoinder to the sanitized visions of the past that are increasingly central to the struggles over historical politics happening across the globe. Tokarczuk shows us a world of shifting alliances and fluid identities, where numerous varieties of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam coexist, though not always peacefully. There is opulent wealth and wretched poverty, elegance and luxury, dirt and muck, cruelty and comfort. It is a complicated and confusing world; the twists of fate are sudden and unpredictable. Tokarczuk does not glorify the past, but neither does she offer us the comforting illusion that we have left its barbarism behind. This is an unflinching and nuanced examination of what “civilization” really means.
Though this is a deeply philosophical novel—or perhaps better put, a novel that is curious about humanity and alternately awe-struck and melancholy about what it learns—The Books of Jacob is fundamentally a story of people, lots and lots of people, and how surprising they are, and the remarkable things they create: ideas, communities, histories, worlds.
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska is a professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ithaca College. Her book, Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in August. She also works as a translator, from Polish to English—she translated a few of Zygmunt Bauman’s essays for the collection Culture and Art, recently published by Polity Press.
*****
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