2025 Readings 13

 Here's the other tome I was in the middle of: Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. I finished it last night, after taking three distinctive breaks to read shorter works. She's obviously a brilliant writer, but I also have to honestly say that I didn't love this book. Or, to put it a different way, I admired the book more than I loved it. That said, this may be one of those instances where I went into it with unfairly high expectations and thus I'm judging it, in turn, unfairly. One night I turned to Janet (we go to bed early out here in the wilderness) and said, "I don't know who she was writing this novel for." In the end, like all legitimate artists, she was creating it for herself, obviously, but what I meant was that there seemed to be a very small audience who would be able to follow along with the story. Being a historian, I know a fair bit about Russian and Polish history, and even more than my fair share about Jewish mysticism and Sabbatai Zevi and the Zohar and even Jacob Frank (although, to be fair, that mainly relates to a fascinating Great Courses lecture on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism). So, I think I probably brought more to the challenge of reading The Books of Jacob than most folks, but there were times when I simply didn't know where she was going with the story. However, in this case this probably ended up standing in the way of me enjoying the book more (that and the obvious fact that I'm not as smart as I think I am, which is a given). Toward the end I remember thinking that I simply didn't know any more about why Jacob Frank did what we did than when I started. However, I think I was criticizing her for not more successfully writing the book that I expected her to write as compared to the book that she wrote, which is, as I referenced above, impressive as hell. The world that Jacob Frank lived in was fascinating and almost beyond comprehension, and she expresses it beautifully in the novel. If I had gone into the book ready to appreciate it as a Gogol-esque celebration of a rich cultural and religious age - and less determined to turn it into an exploration of Jewish mysticism and the true inner workings of Jacob Frank's mind - I'm sure I would have enjoyed it on a whole different level, and, in the end, loved it - but, that's on me.