Gritty details about the realities of daily life at the time alternate with dense passages in which Jacob’s followers argue about theology.
These include some of Jacob’s followers, a bishop with a gambling problem, a noblewoman who self-interestedly supports the “Contra-Talmudists’ ” attempt to convert to Christianity, and Jacob’s grandmother Yente, who is neither dead nor entirely alive, a state that allows her consciousness to roam widely, observing the novel’s action.
Tokarczuk’s account is made up of short sections that alternate among various points of view. He himself was accused of heresy by all three major groups. He led his followers to convert first to Islam and then, later, to Christianity. Jacob preached that the end times had come and that morality, as embodied by the Ten Commandments, had been turned on its head. At its center is the historical figure Jacob Frank, who, in the mid-1750s, was believed to be the Messiah by a segment of Jews in what is now Ukraine. The latest novel by the Polish Nobel Prize winner to appear in English is a behemoth, both in size and subject matter: At nearly 1,000 pages, the book tackles the mysteries of heresy and faith, organized religion and splinter sects, 18th-century Polish and Lithuanian history, and some of the finer points of cabalist and Hasidic theology. A charismatic figure traverses Europe, followers in tow.
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