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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