Jewish gabardines (a type of coat), rituals performed by bishops, the intricate politics of village property ownership are all rendered in exquisite detail. The bones of The Books of Jacob, however, are factual, constructed by Tokarczuk from years of consulting historical archives, documents, and sources - in a brief afterword, she writes a complete bibliography would “take up entirely too much space”. The Books of Jacob, which details Frank’s eventful crisscrossing of Europe in the late 18th-century with his wide-eyed followers (known as Frankists), defies belief, so it is perhaps fortuitous it arrived in English - fastidiously and elegantly translated by Jennifer Croft - at the end of 2021, a time when truth had overtaken fiction in the race to incredulity.
The real life history of Jacob Frank is, according to Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, “a sort of morose but unintentionally absurd comedy”. Indeed, The Books of Jacob, a historical novel about an 18th-century Jewish mystic and self-proclaimed messiah Jacob Frank, possesses a messianic halo of its own: in other words, the story in the book mimics the story around it, a fitting symmetry for a novelist endlessly fascinated by the hidden logic between disparate things. Its page numbers, in line with Hebrew convention, are counted backwards. Its table of contents - whose headings “Of Secret Hand and Eye Signals and Hints” and “Of The Lovemaking of Franciszek Wolowski” read like entries to a dusty encyclopaedia of long-forgotten folklore - is 23 pages long. Reader copies were delivered in two weighty editions, owing to the book’s biblical proportions. In Poland, it won the Nike Literary Award in 2015, the country’s most prestigious literary prize.
The Nobel Committee for Literature called it her “magnum opus”. Before it arrived, it was hailed as a masterpiece.
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