Maybe the best way to explain The books of Jacobthe new novel by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk (Anagrama), is to take a painting of Marc Chagall, one of those rural scenes full of delirious characters, magically realistic rabbis and peasants in trance, and imagine it as a historical novel.
The Jacob of the title, Frank Jacob, was a Polish Jew (1726-1791) who created a mystical-orgiastic sect, in the style of those that appeared in The name of the rose by Umberto Eco, and who had to flee to the Ottoman Empire when he began to accumulate enemies. In Istanbul he converted to Islam and began the journey back to his homeland. to try again, to create a religious dissidence again, a synthesis of the three monotheistic religions. Frank Jacob (in fact, the name Frank was the joking nickname that the Ottomans gave to all Central Europeans) declared himself successor to various messiahs and dervishescalled the Jews to be baptized and created their own religion, the Francoism. He went to prison and came out, had some success at the Habsburg court, where he was considered an evangelizer of Jews, and must have died with hope, because his followers spread throughout Europe and had some influence on the liberal revolutions of the 19th century. .
«I learned about her story and immediately thought how could she be forgotten, erased from the collective memory. I am a woman of a certain culture and I didn’t know anything about Frak Jacob», Olga Tokarczuk said yesterday in Barcelona, on tour in Spain to present her novel and speak to the public in the Catalan capital, San Sebastián and Bilbao. «First I thought about writing a short essay but I started researching and, in the end, I dedicated eight years of work to Frank Jacob».
The books of Jacob It is something more complex than the biography of a more or less extravagant life, narrated with the tools of novels. It’s not exactly a thriller historical in the style of 1793, de Niklas Night and Day. Al contrario: sus 1,072 páginas son a kind of collage of characters that intersect, of scenes that seem like indecipherable antiques and of dreamlike moments. A character named Yenta, an old woman who appears in a coma at the beginning of the novel, is Jacob’s counterpoint and takes readers from the representation of reality to the representation of the dream. From stopped time to accelerated time. From the past to the present.
What makes Frank Jacob’s story attractive to a writer in 2023, to her readers? Silvia Sesé, Tokarczuk’s editor, yesterday described his work «avant-garde and at the same time ancient, with a mythical aura. As if his works, when discovered by readers, had always been there ». The books of JacobTo begin with, it portrays an almost postmodern past, in which collective identities (Jew, Christian, Muslim, Polish, Lithuanian, Russian…) are light and mutable. The Central Europe of the novel is like a European Union of the time in which people come and go, exist and reinvent themselves.