The novel was originally published in 2014, and has been considered Tokarczuk’s masterpiece. That the Wise Might Have It for a Record, That My Compatriots Reflect, Laypersons Gain Some Understanding, and Melancholy Souls Obtain Some Slight Enjoyment. Told by the Dead, Supplemented by the Author, Drawing from a Range of Books, and Aided by Imagination, the Which Being the Greatest Natural Gift of Any Person. The reader is told this in one clause of the book’s stylishly verbose title:Ī Fantastic Journey Across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects. On the other, the novel’s ability to engage relies on the way it imaginatively enters its historical personages lives, and weaves compelling characters, relationships, and plots from the gaps in the historical record.
On one hand, the book is the fruit of painstaking historical research, with Tokarczuk claiming to have worked seven years on the text. A work of historical fiction, it straddles genres. Welcome to eighteenth century Poland, as imagined in Olga Tokarczuk’s recently translated novel The Books of Jacob. The solution to the Apocalypse will have to wait for another day. The other man stays awake, watching his ideas play out in all their baroque intricacy and intensity, until he, too, is overcome by tiredness. He falls into a reverie, or perhaps merely sleep. After a few more puffs, however, the older man’s ability to speak fails to keep pace with the increasing abstraction of his thoughts. Searching for a loophole, they weave theories of increasing complexity, involving Messiahs, the reversing of the Old Laws, and the triumph of the Feminine spirit.
All the signs are apparent: unusual weather conditions, social unrest, unendurable suffering caused by poverty and war. In a quiet room, two men smoke hashish and discuss the inevitability of the Apocalypse.
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