💡 The Books of Jacob announces its ambitions before you even crack it open — its size and heft may be daunting, but just flipping to the first page will prove that it has something unique to offer. The pages of Olga Tukarczuk’s magnum opus are numbered backwards — starting at 962 and counting down to 1, a nod to the upside-down values you will soon see preached by the novel’s charismatic, troubling protagonist.

The novel centers on Jacob Frank, a real 18th-century Jewish leader whom one scholar called the most disturbing figure in the history of messianism. Frank claimed the end times had arrived and that conventional morality needed to be flipped on its head. He encouraged his followers to break religious taboos, bragged about defiling the Torah, and eventually led many of them to convert first to Islam, then to Christianity. His disciples worshipped him as a prophet, writing down his visions in a book called The Words of the Lord.

But calling this Jacob Frank’s story doesn’t quite capture what Tokarczuk is up to. Rather than following Frank’s life chronologically, she’s created a fragmented mosaic — short sections that jump between dozens of characters and perspectives, interpolated with letters, historical documents, maps, and images. The cast is enormous — disciples and noblewomen, priests and poets, doctors and bishops with gambling problems.

The novel’s unusual narrator is Yente, Jacob’s grandmother, who swallows a magical amulet and becomes trapped between life and death. From this cosmic vantage point, she observes not just the novel’s action but centuries of history. Tokarczuk describes her as a “fourth-person narrator” — someone who can transcend individual human perspective to see the divine unity in all things.

It sounds heady — and it is. But Tokarczuk, who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2018, is deftly cosmic with the earthly. She has an eye for vivid, specific detail, blending the high and low, cosmic and mundane with Chaucerian skill. And translator Jennifer Croft captures all of it beautifully, from the stately philosophical passages to the bawdy comedy.

But this is an undeniably difficult read. The sheer number of pages is intimidating, and the number of characters makes it hard to keep track of who’s who. The theological debates are dense, the fragmented structure means you’re constantly reorienting yourself. Jacob himself appears only in glimpses — charismatic, but hard to truly know. And this is very much by design: Tokarczuk is trying to capture something vast — not just one man’s story, but the interconnected web of lives, beliefs, and histories that make up an entire world, writing about the smallest details and the biggest questions.

So is it worth it? It depends on what you’re looking for. This isn’t the place to start with Tokarczuk’s work if you’re unfamiliar — you may want to pick up murder mystery Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead or the philosophical Flights first. But The Books of Jacob offers something increasingly rare: a genuine literary event, a book that takes big risks and mostly pulls them off. It’s the kind of novel that will be debated and analyzed for decades, that demands patience, but rewards those willing to give it. You’ll be glad to have experienced it (and glad that it’s over).

WHERE TO FIND IT- Tokarczuk’s works are sold out at Diwan, but you can find The Books of Jacob as an eBook on Amazon.

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