5/31/2023 0 Comments The book of jacob olgaIt is a dauntingly ambitious piece of work and one of the responses it arouses is just plain amazement at the patience and tenacity that have gone into its construction.Įnglish-speaking readers will have encountered Tokarczuk’s writing in the two previous novels of hers also published by Fitzcarraldo. It takes in esoteric theological arguments, diplomatic history, alchemy, Kabbalah, Polish antisemitism and the philosophical roots of the Enlightenment. As crowded as a Bruegel painting, it moves from mud-bound Galician villages to Greek monasteries, 18th-century Warsaw, Brno, Vienna and the luxurious surroundings of the Habsburg court. Over a thousand pages long, dense with history and incident, it is vast enough to make this reader’s knees buckle. The Books of Jacob by the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk is an epic chronicle of the life and times of Frank and his followers. Furthermore, the course of his turbulent 80-year life coincided with huge political and philosophical changes in Europe, as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth collapsed and traditional religious beliefs were usurped by the rival claims of science. Charismatic, transgressive and downright loopy, Frank comes across today as a Monty Python mashup of Osho, David Koresh and Mormon leader Joseph Smith, but he was highly influential in his time.
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