Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob
When you initially pick up Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (2014; magnificently translated by Jennifer Croft in 2021), two things in particular strike you. First of all, its sheer size: it’s a brick in your hand, a proverbial doorstop, a ready weapon (or convenient pillow). Second, when you peer inside, its pages are numbered backwards so that the 900-odd pages of this extraordinary novel count down, like a literary doomsday clock – which, as we’ll see, is hardly inappropriate.
Jacob Frank was an eighteenth-century mystic (he died five days after Mozart) and religious leader who lived in the complex lands between present-day Ukraine and Poland, then part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A Polish Jew who claimed the end was nigh and that various indiscretions (the usual: food, sex) were the path to purification and enlightenment, Jacob was a hugely charismatic figure, worshipped in his day as a prophet and reincarnation of an earlier self-proclaimed messiah. Today he might come across as either a bit of a loony, or as a dangerous manipulator – and he is certainly both those things. But, in telling his story through fiction, The Books of Jacob allows us to see not just the alluring charlatan but his effects on the complex and apparently limitless world around him, since the true pleasure of this book is the vast detail of Tokarczuk’s panorama and the rich imagination that fills it with beguiling characters, curious events and peculiar incidents.
In The Books of Jacob, we witness an astonishing and fluctuating creation (and it is truly biblical) operating within the shifting sands and competing claims of religion and science – one on the wane, the other in the ascendancy – as worlds are assembled, thrive and then disintegrate. We visit monasteries, mud huts, the sumptuous surroundings of an imperial court. We explore endless theological arcana and irresistible alchemy. We witness swathes of social, political and philosophical revolution at work – transformations that Jacob, and others, are able to exploit and cultivate for their own advantage.
Literary parallels for this astonishing book are possible – Milton’s Paradise Lost, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses – since these equivalents are also huge, encyclopaedic works not only immense in physical size but wonderful in their meticulous comprehension of the world as an endlessly fascinating place – even, and especially, if those worlds are the relatively self-contained ones of Dublin or a Nantucket whaling ship. In some ways, however, to comprehend the uniqueness of Tokarczuk’s achievement, we need to look to non-literary counterparts.
Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is perhaps an expedient equivalent – not just in the wealth of characters, objects and events but the way the score is a continuous, complex patchwork of detail and density held together by a series of simple cues. A further analogy might be Tokarczuk’s compatriot Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog television miniseries, with its ten hour-long films each exploring ethical dilemmas inspired by one of ten commandments. This is not only because of their spiritual affinities and vicinities, and a certain overall strangeness, but since each part of the whole slyly functions to work towards wider structures and meanings, teasing connections, understandings and misapprehensions.
But probably the most useful comparison is to think of some of Pieter Bruegel’s massive canvases – The Procession to Calvary, Children’s Games, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent – and then you get a sense of the magnificently crowded bustle and busyness of Tokarczuk’s work. Like Bruegel, it is in the painstaking minutiae and illuminating observations that so much of The Books of Jacob triumphs, along with the way these both weave and then interact with its grand metaphysical themes and the great arches of history. (And, like a Bruegel painting, few novels have been as well-constructed as this one.)
The backwards numbering of the pages, although an affirmation of the work’s Hebrew heritage and Jewish considerations, is also an oddly thrilling countdown to the end of what is a very big book. Rather than feeling pompously proud of the pages achieved, or indeed weirdly weary of the amount still to be suffered, we get a sense of adventure and delight, as well as regret that our time spent with this absorbing, intriguing novel – and by analogy our days on earth – is running out.
Like life, The Books of Jacob is something to be devoured, savoured, consumed and re-consumed. It is a tempting, desirable, mouth-watering novel. When you’ve gorged on its feast, you feel simultaneously sated, satisfied, and eager for more, for this is a book that prompts and expects several more indulgences at the table of its lavish banquet, as well as constant revisits to nibble at some of its tasty morsels.
Dr David Vernon is the author of four books: Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Beethoven: The String Quartets. His next book, Sibelius: The Symphonies and Tone Poems, will be published in November 2024, while a study of Yukio Mishima’s novels is planned for 2026.