THE BOOKS OF JACOB (Tokarczuk, 2014)
This will, by no means, be a complete and incisive look at a Nobel-winning doorstop of a novel and its mesmerizing and often frustrating leaps and bounds. Not sure I'm equipped for that after one read, or even two, but I will re-read JACOB eventually – along with everything Tokarczuk has written.
What I can tell you / me is that I'm in love with her rhythm and voice – which speaks volumes about the brilliance of Jennifer Croft’s 2021 translation – and that, with JACOB, she has pushed the bounds of what a novel can do (see: mesmerizing and frustrating; I was happily mesmerized in my frustrations). Among those frustrations was that I couldn't keep the names of several of the characters straight, even after more than a month and a thousand pages together – though I suspect that this is a result of my own limitations as a reader and will be rectified in a revisit.
(This is also not an unusual occurrence for me, especially in books involving more than three or four characters. Or in life, really.)
Recommended – though with the caveat that it, like the history it mines and explores, requires diligent and mindful dedication: be prepared to not absorb all of it in one go – but also to witness a staggering exploration of all that a novel can do.
My complete list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.
