The Maybe-Messiah and His Grandmother’s Ghost: On Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘The Books of Jacob’
At last, it has arrived. Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk‘s dark star epic, The Books of Jacob, has been released in English with Jennifer Croft‘s stunning translation. For Ms. Tokarczuk’s English-speaking readers, The Books of Jacob has long hovered on the horizon, promising the full realization of the powerful and idiosyncratic vision we’ve encountered in books such as Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. That her Nobel nomination was rumored to be greatly based on the accomplishments of this book has only magnified the anticipation. And now, it is here.
is a singular, anomalous work, a massive novel overwhelmingly researched and intricately plotted. Rife with paradoxes, the book is a fictional rendering of factual events centered around a controversial and fascinating figure named who instigated a largely forgotten religious movement in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the
