I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus

[READ: December 28, 2023] The Books of Jacob

I don’t recall when I checked this book out.  I think it was in September, which makes me feel less bad about finishing it in December.  Still three month?  Well, it was 965 pages and I didn’t really read it at home, so I guess that kind of works out.

And now in December I don’t exactly remember why I checked it out.  I think I had an audiobook ad for Tokarczuk’s other book Flights and it was raved about.  I checked out this and Flights at he same time, but Flights was recalled by another patron, so  didn’t get to finish it (I barely started it).

But so I didn’t know what this was about at all. But I love a large book, and this was a large book.  It also had the fun detail that the pages ran backwards (in the acknowledgments, she notes that it is because the book is inspired by Hebrew and is (kind of) right to left for numbering.

I can honestly say that I didn’t realize that this book was kind of non fiction until about half way through the book.  It’s not exactly non-fiction, it’s a fictionalized account of something that happened centuries ago based on research and primary documents.

It’s interesting but not especially compelling.  A whole lot happens but really not much happens.  I could have put it down at just about any point and felt “done.”  And yet I kept coming back to it.  I felt like it was a slog to read, but almost every time I read it, I enjoyed what I read and was surprised at how many pages I read in a sitting.

I have to give a lot of credit to Jennifer Croft for the translation, which cannot have been easy, given how many languages the original book talks about.

So what is this book about?

Well, like the novel itself, I am going to cobble my review from other people’s reviews because there’s no way I could do a succinct job of this.

So, the New York Times summarizes the book

Set in the mid-18th century, “The Books of Jacob” is about a charismatic self-proclaimed messiah, Jacob Frank, a young Jew who travels through the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, attracting and repelling crowds and authorities in equal measure.

Frank is based on a real historical figure; the author has clearly done her research. Tokarczuk hews closely to the twists and turns of Frank’s fate as he converts to Islam and then to Catholicism and, along the way, becomes a proto-Zionist.

I had NO IDEA that’s what the book was about.  The subtitle makes it seem fun and wild (which it is and isn’t).

And it starts with a woman who eats a piece of paper which prevents her from dying.  And this woman, Yente, becomes the all-seeing eye of the book.  It’s not exactly told from her point of view, but sometimes it is as she hovers over the world seeing everything.  Tokarczuk semi-jokingly said in an interview that Yente is a kind of “fourth-person narrator.”

Someone on Goodreads wrote that they were really enjoying the book until Jacob showed up.   And while I don’t feel exactly that way, I was really enjoying it before he showed it.

There’s talk of a vicar getting an inscription over the church which sadly has a backwards N.  There’s talk of people selling goods and needing translators, which I really enjoyed.  And there’s a priest who wishes to write a book–a compendium of the world’s smartest thinkers.  He seeks wisdom from every source that he can find.  And he starts a correspondence with a woman who thinks his idea is good but misguided–it turns into a discussion of the merits of Latin (the peasants can’t read it and wouldn’t they benefit most from this book of wisdom).

I started keeping an extensive list of all of he characters and their spouses and crucial characteristics.  But once Jacob came in, it didn’t really matter so much anymore, and I lost track of them.  I am sure that this had a lot to do with my confusion and occasional disinterest because I couldn’t remember who was who.

I’m also taking a few chunks from Marc’s review on Goodreads.  He gave the book three stars which doesn’t necessarily reflect my review, but he really gets to the heart of things nicely:

Her central story focuses on a Jewish heretic movement which actually existed in the middle of the 18th century. The movement was led by Jacob Frank, an Ottoman Jew. He was a very unlikely guru, but had an enormous charisma and managed to get tens of thousands of Jews behind his ‘Trinity Faith’. He seduced them with an eclectic mix of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which was particularly attractive because it offered the Jews, with their always precarious position in Catholic Poland, the prospect of civil rights through baptism.

But all of this is set on the realities of Jewish life in 18th century Poland.  Jews are accused of drinking Christian blood.  They are beaten–one of the major characters has his teeth kicked out.  It absolutely foreshadows the future Holocaust.

And they are constantly chased out of wherever they call home.  Either because they are Jewish or because they have run out of money.

Before I knew that this book was based on real events, I wondered how on earth Tokarcsuk came up with this wild story (the fact that it’s all based on truth makes it even more amazing).  I wondered if she was Jewish (living in very Catholic Poland).

In his Goodreads review Marc notes

Her focus on the Catholic discrimination against Jews in Greater Poland was not appreciated by the right-wing, conservative government currently in power in Warsaw. Also the picture she paints of an extremely diversified Polish nation, with a jumble of ethnicities and religious movements that lived together, contradicts the homogenic Polish identity that has been cultivated since the 2nd world war.

Eventually Jacob winds up in prison for heresy, but no prison can hold him and soon enough he is back out–he outlived the bishops and kings who held him.  And his mystery grew and grew.

There’s one more goodreads reviewer that I’m going to quote, Roman Clodia who makes the excellent point that Tokarczuk

never allows us access to Jacob’s own thoughts or feelings: we see him only from the outside, via his actions and through what other people think and say about him. Narratives and points of view proliferate via letters to and from various characters, the book one of Jacob’s adherents is writing, debates and discussions.

There’s really only one or two scenes where Jacob acts like he believes he is the Messiah.  At first it seems like its all a scam, but by the end, it seems like he genuinely believes it.

I also appreciated that Tokarczuk addresses the place of women in this society and society as a whole.  Both through Jacob’s beloved but unlucky daughter Eva and through many of the women who speak up in various scenes.  Yes, men run things but women are influential in many ways.

Speaking of men running things, there is a lot of talk of the Kabbalah and numerology and every single time I see this written out I can’t help but wonder how anyone every thought it was anything other than utter horseshit. I mean, I know that religion is based on faith and you are expected to believe things that are patently absurd, but imagine that people actually study that “points” of words and come to conclusions about major topics based on the “points” of letters.  It’s like if you played Scrabble and based your life goals on the words that had the same point value.  Good grief.

So, did I enjoy the book?  I’m not entirely sure.

The Times’ review sums up like this

Yet the characters remain at a distance. “The Books of Jacob” rarely touches the emotions. No page, for me, turned itself. …  I don’t mean to dissuade. As with certain operas, I’m glad to have had the experience — and equally glad that it’s over.

And I agree with that pretty solidly.  Although some parts were minor page turners.  But yes I relished when I hit milestones (only 200 pages to go).  And that respect the pages numbers counting down was very cool indeed.

Roman Clodia noted

This has taken me six weeks to read but I think this was the right approach for me as this is a book which is monotone in its pacing: much happens but there is no plot as such, no quickening up and slowing down, no fast and slow chapters – it feels sedate though, I should add, never tiresomely so.

And that’s exactly how I felt (even if it took me more like ten weeks to read.  Because there was no urgency.  I read a lot at lunch time where I felt like I was reading for thirty minutes but it turned out to be ten.

But obviously this was a massive commitment and I’m glad to have stuck with it.  I know that I’ll be thinking about parts of this book for a long time to come.