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qpmnguyen's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
avidreadr's review against another edition
5.0
An incredible achievement of novel. Deeply researched, immersive, unique. Truly like no other novel I've read. As a reader I tend to prefer deep character studies, so the overarching historical aspect wasn't my favorite but does kind of define the novel (Structurally anyways) IMO and that's not a bad thing. Again, super unique.
aristarcodisamo's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Content Warnings
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Death, Antisemitism, Hate crime, Infidelity, Pedophilia, Confinement, Emotional abuse, and Religious bigotry
Minor: Abortion, Alcohol, Blood, Child death, Chronic illness, Pregnancy, War, Incest, Injury/Injury detail, Misogyny, Sexual content, Murder, Sexual harassment, and Violence
grayjay's review against another edition
3.0
The Books of Jacob is a historical epic that takes place during the mid-18th century following the adventures of a Jewish heretical prophet and the followers who travel with him all over Europe throughout the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ottoman Empire, and Moravia.
Jacob Frank's teachings are apocalyptic. He claims that the end times have arrived and the way to usher in the new order is to turn all the old laws upside down. His followers defile the Torah, reject property and marriage, embrace promiscuity, eat pork, and convert first to Islam, and then to Catholicism.
It is about belief, community, and tradition, and the testing of these spheres against new ideas and challenges.
It is very long, and there are many point of view characters, many of whom changed their names a couple times throughout the story adding to the confusion for the reader. I found it difficult to become attached to more than three or four. Not only that, but most of them are pretty unlikable people, with very few redeeming qualities.
I still enjoyed the book. It was just an interesting part of history that I didn't know anything about. The author does an excellent job of bringing these strangr historical characters to life, using her trademark vivid and poetic prose.
Jacob Frank's teachings are apocalyptic. He claims that the end times have arrived and the way to usher in the new order is to turn all the old laws upside down. His followers defile the Torah, reject property and marriage, embrace promiscuity, eat pork, and convert first to Islam, and then to Catholicism.
It is about belief, community, and tradition, and the testing of these spheres against new ideas and challenges.
It is very long, and there are many point of view characters, many of whom changed their names a couple times throughout the story adding to the confusion for the reader. I found it difficult to become attached to more than three or four. Not only that, but most of them are pretty unlikable people, with very few redeeming qualities.
I still enjoyed the book. It was just an interesting part of history that I didn't know anything about. The author does an excellent job of bringing these strangr historical characters to life, using her trademark vivid and poetic prose.
questionableburrito's review against another edition
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
abey's review against another edition
dark
informative
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
nonlinearpaolo's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
informative
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
sam_bizar_wilcox's review against another edition
5.0
The Books of Jacob may well be remembered as Tokarczuk's greatest achievement. It is a massive novel, one that required years of research, and which spans a wide scope of 17th-century European history. It is also shockingly precise: there's very little that feels extraneous in this novel.
There will be, undoubtedly, criticism about the length of the novel. In a book so keenly interested in how ideas are generated and preserved, a book that also tracks the creation of an almanac and which explores the ways that literature depends on the tongue in which it is written, the colossal size feels more aligned with the central themes of the text. Which is, as is often the case with smart post-modern fiction, the text itself.
Ideas are problematized as they revolve around text. "In the beginning was the Word" becomes a controversial refrain, was the conflict between a sect of quasi-converted Jews and the Catholics in Poland. Where one group sees that statement as the end, the other (the central group of inter-devotional travelers) seems to attend to "the Word" in everything. The Word is not just creation, it is everything. Everything is mediated through language. Speech is converted from Hebrew to Turkish to Latin to Polish--all filtered, in this edition of the novel, through translation to English. The titular Jacob, whose name suggests that of the Jewish hero who quite literally wrestled with God, is a figure entirely devoted to reading religious traditions, and casting himself and his followers in roles as they accord to written or performed texts. In one scene, Jacob's followers are converted. Therefore, they must practice repeating their new Catholic names on the top of a mountain--they transform, through spoken repetition, their former Jewish identities into something other.
Language creates others in Tokarczuk's novel. Early in the book, one character is appalled at the idea that a book filled with contemporary folk wisdom be written for the Poles in Latin: "'which Poles, dear Father? Women, for example, rarely speak Latin, for they have frequently not been taught it. And the middle classes don't really know Latin at all [...].'" Here, language becomes an issue of access, where characters (and therefore, readers) must be carefully attuned to how information is shared, and to whom.
Thus introduces the Kabbala. What becomes a sort of conspiratorial throughline in the novel, even more than the title figure, Jacob, is the competing interests in elusive Jewish beliefs and the Zohar. Tokarczuk develops a very contemporary inquiry into the roots of antisemitism. Kabbala is something that is both revered, and, because of its inherent impenetrability, feared. Rumors of blood libel and ungodly alchemy swirl around the goyim as they gaze at this set of religious practices with unease. To understand requires knowledge of another language; everything is translation. Everything is corrupted by said translation. Cracks in meaning breed gossip and salacious rumors.
For all its ambition, The Books of Jacob can, too, be impenetrable. Just as text challenges its characters to read text and language, they must read one another. Family members face difficulty following and comprehending one another. The novel explores a variety of communicative ideas: talking, writing, glances, and sex. Yet, with the passage of time, characters slip away, change, or become translated to the point where they are no longer wholly recognizable as who they were at the beginning of their arc. Perhaps this is the challenge of humanity. Perhaps this is the challenge of the novel's scope.
Reading The Books of Jacob demands devotion. It, much like the texts that it so often alludes to, is a book that requires the reader to submit themself fully to the logic and space of the text. Once done, however, the experience of reading becomes an immensely rewarding one. If Tokarczuk may have been too ambitious for her own good, fair. Some ideas, narrative and linguistic, are left, by the end, less developed than others. But how remarkable is this book, regardless! Where Jacob Frank amasses followers, Tokarczuk does, too. Count me among her converts.
There will be, undoubtedly, criticism about the length of the novel. In a book so keenly interested in how ideas are generated and preserved, a book that also tracks the creation of an almanac and which explores the ways that literature depends on the tongue in which it is written, the colossal size feels more aligned with the central themes of the text. Which is, as is often the case with smart post-modern fiction, the text itself.
Ideas are problematized as they revolve around text. "In the beginning was the Word" becomes a controversial refrain, was the conflict between a sect of quasi-converted Jews and the Catholics in Poland. Where one group sees that statement as the end, the other (the central group of inter-devotional travelers) seems to attend to "the Word" in everything. The Word is not just creation, it is everything. Everything is mediated through language. Speech is converted from Hebrew to Turkish to Latin to Polish--all filtered, in this edition of the novel, through translation to English. The titular Jacob, whose name suggests that of the Jewish hero who quite literally wrestled with God, is a figure entirely devoted to reading religious traditions, and casting himself and his followers in roles as they accord to written or performed texts. In one scene, Jacob's followers are converted. Therefore, they must practice repeating their new Catholic names on the top of a mountain--they transform, through spoken repetition, their former Jewish identities into something other.
Language creates others in Tokarczuk's novel. Early in the book, one character is appalled at the idea that a book filled with contemporary folk wisdom be written for the Poles in Latin: "'which Poles, dear Father? Women, for example, rarely speak Latin, for they have frequently not been taught it. And the middle classes don't really know Latin at all [...].'" Here, language becomes an issue of access, where characters (and therefore, readers) must be carefully attuned to how information is shared, and to whom.
Thus introduces the Kabbala. What becomes a sort of conspiratorial throughline in the novel, even more than the title figure, Jacob, is the competing interests in elusive Jewish beliefs and the Zohar. Tokarczuk develops a very contemporary inquiry into the roots of antisemitism. Kabbala is something that is both revered, and, because of its inherent impenetrability, feared. Rumors of blood libel and ungodly alchemy swirl around the goyim as they gaze at this set of religious practices with unease. To understand requires knowledge of another language; everything is translation. Everything is corrupted by said translation. Cracks in meaning breed gossip and salacious rumors.
For all its ambition, The Books of Jacob can, too, be impenetrable. Just as text challenges its characters to read text and language, they must read one another. Family members face difficulty following and comprehending one another. The novel explores a variety of communicative ideas: talking, writing, glances, and sex. Yet, with the passage of time, characters slip away, change, or become translated to the point where they are no longer wholly recognizable as who they were at the beginning of their arc. Perhaps this is the challenge of humanity. Perhaps this is the challenge of the novel's scope.
Reading The Books of Jacob demands devotion. It, much like the texts that it so often alludes to, is a book that requires the reader to submit themself fully to the logic and space of the text. Once done, however, the experience of reading becomes an immensely rewarding one. If Tokarczuk may have been too ambitious for her own good, fair. Some ideas, narrative and linguistic, are left, by the end, less developed than others. But how remarkable is this book, regardless! Where Jacob Frank amasses followers, Tokarczuk does, too. Count me among her converts.
javansutton's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
casparb's review against another edition
my some people are terribly threatened by Big Books - I read Olga's Drive your Plow a few years ago and had a kind of middling feeling it wasn't The One for me but Jacob here is quite something of its own. It's one of those books that seems to demand an accompanying character sheet & I didn't feel I needed that for War and Peace so I suppose you have been warned. That's not OT's problem just a consideration.
Anyway all that aside this is really really good it's probably to be labelled something like historical fiction it's based on the historical Jacob Frank who I did not know anything about, set in the late eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian empire. I love that unfamiliarity & the text quite organically blooms into an exploration of Polish identity through the historical figurations of Jewish identity and Catholicism. It's definitely a big recommend if you're one of those people into Jewish mysticism I don't think I've ever read any literary fiction that just Hits Kabbalah for somebody's sake the text seems to present itself as structured around the tzimtzum. My favourite parts were easily the forays & meditations of various multiple converts wandering into Kabbalah ! Exquisite Tokarczuk
Jacob himself is kind of awful, and I have every reason to believe this is historically so. Well done OT & I think testament to this accuracy is the fervency of the Polish right (read: government) in accusing her of defaming Poland and so on. At the least I recommend having a go at Jacob Frank's Wikipedia page because this is a hell of a story that one doesn't seem to encounter in anglophone education and of course I speak for all of that don't I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Frank)
Masterful translation too from Jennifer Croft who manages to even render puns coherent. It's been a long time since I've seen anything like it.
mwah good stuff and a pleasant reminder that incredible literature is very much still being produced as we like to think the classics were
Anyway all that aside this is really really good it's probably to be labelled something like historical fiction it's based on the historical Jacob Frank who I did not know anything about, set in the late eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian empire. I love that unfamiliarity & the text quite organically blooms into an exploration of Polish identity through the historical figurations of Jewish identity and Catholicism. It's definitely a big recommend if you're one of those people into Jewish mysticism I don't think I've ever read any literary fiction that just Hits Kabbalah for somebody's sake the text seems to present itself as structured around the tzimtzum. My favourite parts were easily the forays & meditations of various multiple converts wandering into Kabbalah ! Exquisite Tokarczuk
Jacob himself is kind of awful, and I have every reason to believe this is historically so. Well done OT & I think testament to this accuracy is the fervency of the Polish right (read: government) in accusing her of defaming Poland and so on. At the least I recommend having a go at Jacob Frank's Wikipedia page because this is a hell of a story that one doesn't seem to encounter in anglophone education and of course I speak for all of that don't I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Frank)
Masterful translation too from Jennifer Croft who manages to even render puns coherent. It's been a long time since I've seen anything like it.
mwah good stuff and a pleasant reminder that incredible literature is very much still being produced as we like to think the classics were