Los libros de Jacob

Jacob Frank, the protagonist of this novel, seems due to his adventures a fictitious character that only the mind of a novelist could conceive. However, it turns out that he did exist, and his life is historically documented. The Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk starts from the adventures of this real character to build an impetuous, dazzling novel. In the second half of the 18th century, the young Jew Jacob Frank reinvented himself over and over again; he toured two empires, that of the Habsburgs and the Ottoman; he professed three religions; he proclaimed himself Messiah; he stirred up the authorities; he gathered disciples and created a sect that advocated breaking taboos and practiced, according to some rumors, orgiastic and bacchanalian rites; he sought spiritual transcendence in the Age of Enlightenment; he questioned the established order and was persecuted and accused of heresy... With this almost implausible real character -charismatic, crazy, subversive, iconoclastic-, the author builds an epic, historical, satirical and philosophical novel that covers Europe to its ends, from peasant villages to sophisticated courts. With exquisite prose and a relentless pace, Tokarczuk traps the reader in her clutches and doesn't let go.