The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk

This is the book that sealed the author into the book of life, as well as tippping the scale in her favor when it came to the Nobel Prize for Literature. I am not sure that I exactly grasp it all, but it is a hard book to put town--and a hard one to pick up because it weighs in at a thousand pages, and it is not bedtime reading. The subtitle in fact is the Reader's Digest of what is contained : “A Fantastic Journey Across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects. Told by the Dead, Supplemented by the Author, Drawing From a Range of Books, and Aided by Imagination, the Which Being the Greatest Natural Gift of Any Person. That the Wise Might Have It for a Record, That My Compatriots Reflect, Laypersons Gain Some Understanding, and Melancholy Souls Obtain Some Slight Enjoyment.” Well, there you have it, in a nutshell. The sprawling tale, richly decorated with period maps, drawings, paintings, and etchings, is the story of a real-life 18th-century Polish mystic named Jacob Frank (1726-1791). From humble beginnings, he claimed to be the Messiah sent “to introduce an eternal existence into the world.” He rejected the Talmud and converted to Islam and then Catholicism. Along the way, he attracted tens of thousands of disciples, solicited and lost fortunes, escaped imprisonment, advised the Holy Roman Empress and set up his own faux royal court. I cannot say that I completely understood it but is miraculously entertaining and consistently fascinating. Do not miss it, even if you cannot lift it.