Olga Tokarczuk's THE BOOKS OF JACOB (Tr by Jennifer Croft)

"Literature is a particular type of knowledge, it is --" he sought the right words, and suddenly a phrase came ready to his lips -- "the perfection of imprecise forms."

This book's actual, complete title is The Books of Jacob: or, A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages and three major religions, not counting the minor sects. Told by the dead, supplemented by the author, drawing from a range of books, and aided by imagination, the which being the greatest natural gift of any person. That the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls gain some slight enjoyment. So before we even hit the table of contents, translator Jennifer Croft has already earned her no-doubt inadequate fee for bringing Olga Tokarczuk's latest to the English language reading public... although the table of contents reads similarly to the title, with chapter names like "Of the Bishop of Kameniec Mikolaj Dembowski, who doesn't realize he is merely passing through this whole affair" so, yeah, Croft got a workout there, too.

And now I'm just sitting here wondering what high falutin' pseudo-18th-century Polish sounds like, and how much of an extra effort that would have posed to Croft. A better literary detective than I, though, will have to answer that in full; I can just say that, thank goodness, Croft chose not to render the prose in high falutin' pseudo-18th-century English. I just had my year's dose of that and then some, yannow?

Anyway, now you know why I've been mostly absent from this blog of late, having tackled several monster books (others being the second volume of Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet, The Laughter of Carthage, Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars on dead tree and Alan Moore's Jerusalem in audio format) that... have all turned out to have very similar scope and themes, actually. Ow, my brain. 

Anyway, The Books of Jacob. Deep breath. 

At its heart, The Books of Jacob is a great big hunk of quality historical fiction of the Edward Rutherford/John Follett variety, except Eastern European instead of Anglocentric, and also including a tinge of magic realism in the form of a character, Yente, whose slow decline and psuedo-death we witness early on and then whose afterlife as a pseudo-ghost is woven deftly into the account of larger events in 18th century Ukraine/Poland, in which Catholic priests, Orthodox presbyters and Jewish rabbis all have their long-winded and deeply flawed say as they wander in and out of village life, agriculture and commerce. I was brought to recall bits of Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus at times; at others the experience of reading The Books of Jacob made me really want to re-read Sjón's magnificent CoDex: 1962 for something like the fourth time, for CoDex 1962 could almost serve as a sequel to The Books of Jacob.

Anyway, Jacob, known to history as Jacob Frank but born with a completely different name just as almost everybody in this massive tome was. Jacob Frank... not so much presented himself as a reincarnation of the last guy a small population of the Jewish population of 18th century Poland and Ukraine thought was the Messiah as allowed everybody to continue thinking he was that Messiah after they'd all convinced themselves, is the only character whose perspective on things we don't get in these 900+ pages; Tokarczuk gives us multiple third person narrators with the points of view of Jacob's parents, cousins, grandparents (of whom the aforementioned Yente is one), wife, lovers, children and nephews, all of whom at various times try to break out of Jacob's orbit and live their own lives but are always drawn back into Jacob's tight little world of theological, ethical and existential problems as he tries to keep his small sect of True Believers from dying in various conflicts or from being executed in various pogroms and threatened pogroms as their mostly-Polish homeland is on the verge of being partitioned into three pieces, given to Russia, Prussia and Austria to rule when its hereditary rulers proved ineffectual against stronger neighbors' territorial ambitions and internal strife within its commonwealth, and if this sounds like a weak-ass description of the historical background of this novel that's my fault and not Tokarczuk's or Croft's; this is a huge bolus of unfamiliar history and culture for a Wyoming girl to try to get down and I wound up letting some of the details wash over me because there was so much else going on in the Frankist sect and among the assorted nobles, religious figures and occasional Turkish officials and merchants who at various times sheltered, aided, persecuted or barely tolerated the Frankists and their antics.

Among said antics being a checkered record of converting to other faiths as directed by Jacob or his predecessor Messiah and then, to curry favor with their new co-religionists, confirming some of the nastiest prejudices about the Jewish faith their new brothers in Allah or Christ (Orthodox OR Catholic, though it's mostly their mass-conversion to Catholicism that gets focused on here) have. Like the Blood Libel. Yeah. It's a warts-and-all portrait of the sect that Tokarczuk is going for here.

I had to put the book down for a while when I came to that, since I read it in the late spring of 2022 while a whole bunch of my own fellow citizens have decided it's in their interests to revive crap like the Blood Libel while also insisting that Jewish Space Lasers are responsible for Californian wildfires, etc. And, of course, my experience of reading this book was colored by the other stuff I was reading at the time, such as the second Pyat novel with its own Antisemitic smorgasbord of content (if you TL;DR'd my post on The Laughter of Carthage, I'll just say its main character is a Jewish Ukrainian who nevertheless decides Tsarist Russia was better Russia and, fleeing to the United States, becomes a traveling rabble rouser for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s) and the finale of Terra Ignota with its Messianic character who, like Jacob Frank, had a tendency to glop up his polyglotism to the point where only his closest acolytes could understand him. And there were plenty of cosmic and theological speculations in Jerusalem, too, of course. I did not choose to combine these reading experiences deliberately; that's just how it worked out, but it was a very, very interesting combination that might have broken my brain forever except phew! I'm an atheist. Now more than ever.

But anway, The Books of Jacob. It's almost but not quite entirely unlike my prior Olga Tokarczuk experience, the delightfully odd and dark Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a book I'm planning to read again as one of those that promises to be a fundamentally different book once you know Who Dunnit. I'm probably not going to re-read The Books of Jacob, though, because, having had to look up so many historical references and personages, I feel like I already read it twice. But everybody should read it at least once. Possibly without the company of the other books I had going on, but you do you, friends.