FICTION
Robert Collins
The Books of Jacob
by Olga Tokarczuk,
translated by Jennifer Croft
Fitzcarraldo £20 pp928
“Psychotherapist of the past”
is how the Nobel-winning
novelist Olga Tokarczuk
describes her role as Poland’s
most internationally fêted
author. This novel, a bestseller
in her home country, is her
third to be published in
English and the work singled
blood libels and summary
executions. “Blood is shed,
hands and arms are broken,
teeth are bashed out of
mouths,” runs one description,
typical of the novel’s blank,
parable-like tone.
Frank’s peregrinations
through the Habsburg and
Ottoman empires are fed to us
through the perspectives of a
dizzying number of
characters, including an
elderly comatose woman
called Yente, who is able to
time travel and see all the
events of the book as she lies
dying, and the real-life Father
Benedykt Chmielowski,
creator of Poland’s first
encyclopedia, whose imagined
correspondence with the
baroque poet Elzbieta
Druzbacka provides the most
memorable strand of the book.
In Tokarczuk’s fragmentary
portrait, Frank lingers in theHere, her myriad narrative
strands, scattered in a
sprawling mosaic, are harder
to become engrossed in. Her
historical revisionism shines
through in her striking female
characters, who are notably
stronger and more captivating
than Frank himself.
What may prove forbidding
for an Anglophone audience,
though, is the novel’s
concertedly mythical, almost
detached style and the sheer
absence of pace, due in part to
the novel’s immense weight of
research. The book took seven
years to write, seven years to
translate and — to some
readers — may feel like it takes
that long to read. Yet Jennifer
Croft’s translation is a marvel,
rendering the prose luminous.
In the course of 928 pages
there isn’t a single sentence
that sounds as if it wasn’t
originally minted in English. cout by the Nobel committee as
her “magnum opus”.
Through the tale of real-life
18th-century Jewish cult
leader Jacob Frank, Tokarczuk
confronts Poland with an
uncomfortable period of its
history, one marked by slave
owning and antisemitic
persecution. When the novel
was published there, her
revisionist epic earned
her both death threats and
the country’s biggest
literary award.
Her antihero Frank receives
similarly polarised treatment
from his native Poland, where
“Jews are always afraid —
whether it’s of a Polish Lord,
or of a Cossack, of injustice or
hunger or cold”. On the one
hand he is hailed as a prophet
by his Jewish followers. On the
other he is pursued by
outraged Orthodox Jews,
themselves subject to constantdistance as a luridly slippery
figure: a preening svengali
who advocates group sex,
dresses like a Turk, has a
penchant for monogrammed
underwear, converts to Islam,
convinces his Polish followers
to convert to Catholicism, and
is then locked up by the Poles
for 13 years for declaring
himself the Messiah, before
living out his years in Germany,
where he dubs himself the
Baron of Offenbach.
Tokarczuk isn’t an easy
writer. Her Nobel citation
lauded her for her “crossing of
boundaries”, and her previous
two novels published in
English — Flights (2017), a
patchwork of fictional and
autobiographical snippets on
the theme of travel, and Drive
Your Plow Over the Bones of the
Dead (2018), a feminist eco-
themed noir novel — showed
off that ability to great effect.CRIME FICTION
ROUNDUP
The unsolved disappearance
of a six-year-old girl
reverberates across the
decades in Heather Young’s
haunting novel The Lost Girls
(Verve £9.99). Emily is the
youngest of three sisters,
spending the summer of 1935
on the shore of a remote lake
in Minnesota, when she
vanishes without trace.
Emily’s middle sister, Lucy,spends the rest of her life in
the house on the lake, unable
to tear herself away from its
painful memories. After her
death, the house passes to her
A novel that won its author a prize — and death threats
Lost girls and
locked rooms
Mysteries set in Minnesota and modern-
day India are among Joan Smith’s picks
A Nobel-winner’s
epic bestseller that
caused anger in
her native Poland
great-niece, Justine. The
unexpected inheritance
enables Justine to leave a
controlling boyfriend and flee
to Minnesota, where she finds
Lucy’s journal and begins to
understand the family secrets
that led to a tragic event.
Lucy’s father, a Bible-
thumping descendant of
Welsh coal miners, is one of
the most vivid characters in
this terrific mystery, which
shows the corrosive impact
misplaced loyalty has on
generations of women.
RV Raman’s hugely
engaging novel A Will to Kill
(Pushkin Vertigo £8.99) is set
in modern-day India, but its
origins lie in the golden age
of crime fiction. The story
takes place in a misty valley in
the Nilgiri mountain range,
where a wealthy art collector,
Bhaskar Fernandez, is holding
a family party. Among the
guests is a private detective,
Harith Athreya, invited as anobserver after several
attempts on Fernandez’s life.
Athreya has only just arrivedwhen the valley is cut off by^
a landslide, an event quickly
followed by a murder in the
family mansion. Raman
makes the most of his version
of a locked-room mystery,
endowing Athreya with an
omniscience rarely seen in
today’s jaded detectives.
Simon Beckett’s The Lost
(Trapeze £14.99) opens with
a scene of stomach-churning
carnage. A firearms officer,
Jonah Colley, gets a frantic
phone call from another cop,
someone he hasn’t seen foryears. The man sounds
desperate, asking Jonah to
meet him at a sinister-
sounding location, Slaughter
Quay, on the River Thames.
Jonah arrives to find four
bodies, but is attacked and
injured before he can call for
back-up. When he wakes up in
hospital, he discovers that the
chief suspect in the murders is
a man who was investigated
and cleared after the
disappearance of Jonah’s
young son ten years earlier.
It’s an intriguing set-up, but
the violence is unrelenting,
and it is hard to believe that
Jonah can take so many
beatings while pursuing his
one-man quest for justice.
Camilla Grebe is one
of those authors who
demonstrate the continuing
inventiveness of Scandinavian
crime fiction. The Hideout
(Zaffre £8.99), translated by
Sarah Clyne Sundberg, has a
teenage boy on the run from
a drug dealer. Arriving in a
quiet seaside town, he takes
a job as companion to a boy
who is paralysed after a road
accident. Meanwhile the
police in Stockholm are
puzzled by the discovery of
the bodies of several young
men washed up from the sea,
an investigation that seems
entirely separate until Grebe
brings them together in a plot
of dazzling originality. cBOOKS
Sisters in grief The Lost GirlsCRIME
BOOK
OF THE
MONTH
DANIELA ALFIERI