Stock image for illustration purposes only - book cover, edition or condition may vary.
The Books of Jacob
Olga Tokarczuk
€ 150.00
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for The Books of Jacob
Other book format. Signed and numbered limited edition. This elegant boxed edition is covered in real cloth specially dyed in the coveted Fitzcarraldo colourway – Yves Klein blue – and adorned with its trademark logo, inspired by the imprints of early printing presses. An exposed binding celebrates the grand scale and literary gravitas of this epic publication from one of the world’s most gifted novelists.The Books of Jacob was first published in Polish in 2014. In collaboration with Fitzcarraldo Editions, this collector’s edition of the long-awaited English-language edition, translated from the Polish by International Booker Prize–winning translator Jennifer Croft and signed by the author, is limited to only 1000 copies. Tokarczuk’s ninth novel runs to over 900 pages and is described by many as her magnum opus.
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas begin to sweep the continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumours of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. In The Books of Jacob, her masterpiece, 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk writes the story of Frank through the perspectives of his contemporaries, capturing Enlightenment Europe on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.
Product Details
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2022
Publisher
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Condition
New
Number of Pages
920
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781804270134
SKU
9781804270134
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-1
About Olga Tokarczuk
Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels, three short story collections and has been translated into forty-five languages. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, in Jennifer Croft’s translation. In 2019, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Reviews for The Books of Jacob
‘A magnificent writer.’ — Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate ‘A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.’ — Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News ‘[A] visionary novel ... Tokarczuk is wrestling with the biggest philosophical themes: the purpose of life on earth, the nature of religion, the possibility of redemption, the fraught and terrible history of eastern European Jewry. With its formidable insistence on rendering an alien world with as much detail as possible, the novel reminded me at times of Paradise Lost. The vividness with which it’s done is amazing. At a micro-level, she sees things with a poetic freshness.... The Books of Jacob, which is so demanding and yet has so much to say about the issues that rack our times, will be a landmark in the life of any reader with the appetite to tackle it.’ — Marcel Theroux, Guardian ‘“The Books of Jacob” is an unruly, overwhelming, vastly eccentric novel. It’s sophisticated and ribald and brimming with folk wit. It treats everything it bumps into at both face value and ad absurdum. It’s Chaucerian in its brio…This novel’s density is saturnalian; its satire nimble; academics will tug at its themes, as if they were pinworms, for decades.’ — Dwight Garner, New York Times ‘Tokarczuk shows impressive skill in recreating an entire era and world, which ranges from Poland to Smyrna and Vienna. Yet her real genius lies in the cast of characters she has conjured up; dozens, each fully realised, from an emperor downwards.... She is also ambitious in her willingness to ask (and sometimes answer) extraordinarily large questions through these character studies.... Holding it all together for 900 pages is incredible, but that is not what makes this book great. Tokarczuk, unafraid and ambitious, creates a very fallible messiah, yet makes it seem reasonable and human to believe in his divinity. That is a kind of literary miracle.’ — Antonia Senior, The Times ‘In Tokarczuk’s telling this epic of myth and history is a celebration of cultural diversity, a plea for tolerance and – notwithstanding its impeccably researched historical setting – a contemporary story of borders, refugees and migration. Despite the novel’s great length, the world she has recreated is wrenching to leave…. Huge credit must be given to Croft, whose magnificent, lively translation is also a work of pure scholarship: the multiple voices, styles, landscapes and inventories she renders into English bring this lost world vividly to life…. As a reading experience, aspects of Tolstoy’s War and Peace are an obvious comparison; but so too is The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald’s epic in miniature of German Romanticism, and Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy: all immersive works in which the act of turning the pages is akin to surrender.’ — Catherine Taylor, Prospect