This polyphonic approach is never deliberately obscure: each character has a deep, sincere, and (because it is in Tokarczuk’s nature) often humorous “psychological portrait.” We get glimpses of the supposed Messiah as a child, saying goodnight to every soul in the world, like Adam naming the creatures of Eden. She is particularly attentive to the perspectives of women and outsiders, who bore the brunt of the Enlightenment’s growing pains yet are conspicuously missing from official histories. Tokarczuk never gets too close to the character of Jacob, instead presenting him through the eyes of his contemporaries, both ardent believers and staunch skeptics. The movement espoused “redemption through sin”: fast days became feasts, and rules on modesty, purity, and even incest were overturned. Jacob Frank, as he would come to be known, was a real man who inspired legions of followers into “Frankism,” a Sabbatean Jewish movement that held, at its core, the belief that people should transgress every moral boundary they know. Whether Jakub Lejbowicz Frank is a true mystic or a fraud is not clear, neither in Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s long-anticipated The Books of Jacob nor in the history books. Rumors of a young and charismatic Jew, said by some to be the Messiah, reach the region’s townspeople through long chains of scholars and merchants along the trade routes from Smyrna (Izmir) on the Mediterranean coast to the settlements on the North Sea. THE YEAR IS 1752 (the page, 900-or-so), and a carriage is barreling through misty Podolia, a historic region that now sits on Ukraine’s eastern border.

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk