In The Books Of Jacob, a Nobel laureate tells the epic story of a self-proclaimed messiah

In a certain sense, Tokarczuk is concerned with letting you see the sweat on her product. The book concludes with a note on sources, and every period detail reads as faultlessly placed. The Books Of Jacob projects verisimilitude. Simultaneously, fictional composites exist alongside the historical personalities. Novelistic convention is subtle here, but ever-present. Frequently present, too, are reproduced paintings, lithographs, maps, and long blocks of direct quotation. Archival documents and pure invention share page space in a way that invites commentary and endless interpretation, putting into formal play the very questions of allegorical and mystical meaning that feature as the novel’s content.

Reality becomes increasingly difficult to parse from fabrication, and the power of narrative, it’s clear, lies in the resonances and connections that artifice can reveal between known facts. As one late passage has it, “Over time, moments occur that are very similar to one another. The threads of time have their knots and tangles, and every so often there is a symmetry, every once in a while something repeats, as if refrains and motifs were controlling them, a troubling thing to notice.”

Within the Enlightenment period that Tokarczuk presents, much progress was made in the study of optics. Jacob Frank’s preaching is depicted alongside Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the bifocal, the publication of Newton’s physical observations of light, and the popularization in Europe of the camera obscura—a technological precursor of the photograph. The suggestiveness of this choice in images for The Books Of Jacob is rich, as light and its manipulation come increasingly to be explained in the terms of the incipient Scientific Revolution. One story that the book has to tell is then of the undecidable encounter between eons-old faith and a growing rationalism.

At the same time, it’s a virtue of mysticism to be contradictory and puzzling, and in Jacob Frank, Tokarczuk has a hugely confounding figure. Most of the novel observes him in a broad third-person. Occasionally, there are diaristic asides from Frank’s disciple and biographer, Nahman of Busk. Perhaps the most interesting and reaching of the perspectives on offer here is that of Yente, Jacob Frank’s comatose grandmother: Hovering somewhere between life and death after a debacle involving an amulet, she dispassionately observes the entirety of the plot as a disembodied spirit. She synthesizes the diversity of otherwise random events, cutting out of them an intelligible figure. In this way she most resembles the author, as The Books Of Jacob’s art is restoring and activating that recognizably human movement that’s always present beneath the inert, static material of facts.

The Books Of Jacob’s choices can sometimes be daunting. The book’s scale; its hugely populous cast of named characters; its reverse-ordered page numbers, done in honor of Hebrew convention; and the intense pitch of human suffering so often achieved—it all makes for less than hospitable reading. In many ways, it’s the contents of the past itself that’s the source of this difficulty—obdurate as it is, and liable to unpredictable change. If there’s one thing that Joseph Frank, the messiah, is concerned with imparting, it’s the provisionality of all earthly things. In her clear-sighted rendering of enormous historical momentum, pitilessly displaying the dissolution of both national borders and whole systems of belief, Olga Tokarczuk achieves much the same objective.

Drew Dickerson lives in Providence, Rhode Island.