Here is one of those literary projects that involves effort, research and talent worth noting, Jacob's books, which also represents a discovery for the reader of a truly amazing character, Jacob Frank, who defined himself like the Messiah. Olga Tokarczuk published this novel in her native Poland in 2014, after six years of work; therefore, about five before her name became known worldwide thanks to the awarding of the Nobel Prize.
To a large extent, it was this work that most impressed the jury of the Swedish Academy when it came to opting for this author born in Sulechów in 1962, and academically trained in Psychology. Tokarczuk debuted as a novelist in 1993, winning the Polish Association of Book Publishers Award, and has also signed plays and poetics, in such a way that she is a writer prepared for the emotional observation of the human being, with a vision scenic and highly accentuated characters and that indeed shows a linguistic and formal concern.
Such aspects lead very especially to this story set at the beginning of the second half of the Age of Enlightenment, with the leading role of a young man with spiritual obsessions, rebellious and highly transgressive for his time. Already from the very long subtitle, which begins: "OR GREAT JOURNEY ACROSS SEVEN BORDERS, FIVE LANGUAGES AND THREE GREAT RELIGIONS"..., we find ourselves in front of an exceptional novel. So much so that despite the fact that we could classify it as historical, it begins with a fantastic element, that is, with Jacob's grandmother, the medium Yenta, who, after having swallowed a cabalist amulet, remains in a state between alive and dead, with the wonderful gift of seeing everything: what will happen to his family and his country.
This fondness for the cabalistic and symbolic in the distant past has characterized Tokarczuk's prose since his first novel. In the postface, Abel Murcia reports that that text already presented a 17th century in which a journey was undertaken in search of a mysterious book "that God himself would have hidden from the eyes of mortals, not yet prepared for its revelations". , by a marquis belonging to a secret brotherhood, a courtesan and a mute carter.
Likewise, for The Books of Jacob, Tokarczuk herself traveled to a multitude of places in search of graphic sources (engravings, above all), bibliographical and geographical sources: to the birthplace of her protagonist, the Polish Korolówka (now Ukrainian), and to Lviv; to Wallachia, in Romania, apart from Moravia, Istanbul and Offenbach am Main, where Frank died in 1791. Here, according to her own account, the register of deaths, marriages and births that she found in the municipal archive allowed her to “reconstruct the composition of the entourage that accompanied Jacob Frank to the end in foreign lands, as well as broadly following the future of the Frankist families who returned to Poland”.
He is referring, therefore, to the man who became so charismatic that he was linked to the powerful of two empires, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, and whose practices – which included sexual orgies – earned him accusation of heresy. These vicissitudes were similar to those of his reference, the Turkish Sabbatai Tzvi, who had proclaimed himself the Jewish messiah the previous century and who ended up converting to Islam to avoid being executed. He would end up founding the sect of the Sabbateans, fanatical interpreters of the Kabbalah and defenders of the existence of occult laws.
In this case, we see how Frankism constituted a kind of mix between Christianity and Judaism, by accepting the New Testament. In this sense, Tokarczuk, in addition to printing a descriptive content of the first order in his style, through which the different locations of the novel, whether they are Vienna, Izmir or Poland, become meticulous and vivid, makes a great portrait of which, as Gershom Schole put it, he was a sinister and malevolent figure.
Olga Tokarczuk. The books of Jacob. Translation by A. Orzeszek Sujak and Ernesto Rubio. Anagram. 1,072 pages. 29.90 euros
