Seminar: Crossing Boundaries As A Form of Life: Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, with Nicholas Birns
The Books of Jacob (2014) is the central work of the acclaimed contemporary Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
Tokarczuk’s nearly thousand-page novel, translated into English by Jennifer Croft (herself a noted memoirist and novelist) teems with knowledge memory, and experience telling a compelling story even as it brings alive a vanished world. In telling the story of the eighteenth-century Polish Jew Jacob Frank - at different times messianic claimant and holy fool; shaman and showman; Muslim, Catholic; and Jew - Tokarczuk uses the form of the historical novel to explore questions of identity in an era, much like ours, poised uneasily between ethnocentric and pluralist ideas of nationhood.