This has been a good start to the year for my reading. My “To Read” pile grew by half a dozen titles that I had as Christmas gifts. There is the usual selection that represent my interests: some novels, a travel book or two, and an interesting looking history volume. The pile now stands at a round dozen. So I’ve kicked off with two books that could hardly be more different.
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I bought The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk at least two years ago, maybe three, and have been picking it up and putting it down ever since. I’ve read a couple of other books by the Polish Nobel Prize for Literature winner – Flights and Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead – and thoroughly enjoyed both. Her writing is funny and thoughtful, and the themes explored wide ranging and grounded in her and her country’s history and culture. Having lived here for more than twenty years I find they have helped broaden my understanding and respect for both, too. She also has a superb, prize winning translator to the English language. Her Nobel was awarded for her body of work after ...Jacob was published and the blurb on my copy describes it as “her masterpiece”. I wouldn’t dispute either the citation or the award.
It’s a huge book, nearly a thousand pages, and the table of contents alone runs to 23 pages, covering the seven Books... in question. They in turn comprise in total some thirty one sections, and 253 (yes, two hundred and fifty three!) chapters. OK, some of them are less than a page long, but they are still distinct parts of the narrative, separate pieces of creativity that go into the whole work. Now, that I hadn’t realized until I bought the thing, got it home and studied it with a little more attention than I had done in the shop. Then I saw another piece of creativity: the page numbering runs backwards (from eight hundred and whatever at the start down to eleven at the finish). This is a reflection of its subject matter (briefly, 18th century Jewry) – books in Hebrew are always read from right to left (i.e. back to front). Gimmicky? Perhaps – but then, does it matter? When reading a book it’s not normal practice to read the page number, so as long as the narrative is logical and flows, I don’t think it does. Certainly after the first hour or so’s reading I no longer noticed, and it certainly didn’t spoil the experience.
I say that, because reading The Books of Jacob is not so much an enjoyment (as any good book must be) but something to immerse yourself in. It’s taken me since Christmas to get through it, reading a little every day – and often a good bit more. Other books of similar size – The Lord of the Rings springs to mind – have taken me equally as long to get through, but have proved (at least to me) well worth the effort.
...Jacob is a historical novel about an 18th century Jew who establishes, in essence, a new religion in an attempt to prove he is the new Messiah. He attracts an ever growing number of disciples, they intermarry, have big families, and indulge in a catalogue of strange rituals (many of them involving nudity and what would today be termed orgies) in order to cement their love and allegiance to Jacob Frank (the titular character of the book). They roam from place to place around present day Poland, Ukraine, Czechia, Hungary, Austria and Germany, where having lived to a ripe old age Jacob dies and his entourage drifts apart as they too relocate and pass away. The End. It’s an extraordinary work of research as much as anything else: while reading it I popped in and out of Wikipedia when the names and details of the lives of the main characters sounded familiar or an extraordinary action attributed to them – and they were all there. Frank existed, as did his group of followers, and they followed the course described in the book. The fiction clearly falls in the dialogue and personal interactions between them all – and all of that is believable.
Yes, The Books of Jacob was and is a difficult read, the subject matter complex and in places unbelievable – even though based around historical fact. There’s a lot to absorb, not least the long list of characters, and this is not helped by them having to change their names from Jewish to Polish halfway through the book (it’s a condition imposed on them by the Catholic Church in Poland in order to secure baptism into the church). From that part of the book the names are used interchangeably, although usually with a clarification (for instance “...Moshe, now Marcin….”). It could detract from the story, but Tokarczuk manages to do it without spoiling its narrative.
In summary: if you like historical fiction, and if you’re not afraid of a big complex yarn that will take a lot of effort to read and digest – a true reading challenge - then I thoroughly recommend The Books of Jacob. If not then steer clear!
I loved it.
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Lewis Baston’s Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders could not present a bigger contrast to Tokarczuk’s epic. It does exactly what it says on the tin, in an entertaining and detailed way. Baston is a political historian I had never come across before, and as an Englishman (and, dare I say it, a europhile) I found the topic of great interest. I spent the last 20 years of my working life living in Poland and travelling around the world from project to project, much of it within the EU bloc. My home is still in Warsaw, and hence within the EU and Schengen Zone. Ten years ago, I voted in favour of Britain Remaining in the Union – because nothing I heard during the rushed and poorly conducted national conversation in the lead up to the Referendum vote from the Leave campaign convinced me that the country (and hence my immediate and extended family) would be better off outside. Better the devil you know, as my sister put it. Which is not to say the dull and garbled messages from the Remain campaigners (in particular PM Cameron and Chancellor Osborne) made a strong case for the status quo – it didn’t, and in my view they never actually took the issue seriously until it was far too late. Their conduct in the immediate aftermath, essentially walking away from the clear mess they had contributed much to creating while blaming everybody else, was despicable.
None of this is dwelt upon at any length or detail in Borderlines, and this is very much to the author’s credit. A handful of passages suggest he is of a like mind, but his focus is on going back much farther than the Referendum and its fallout, and his net is cast across the entire European Continent: Britain is no more than a quite minor cast member. Instead, the book is an account of a lifetime spent rambling around Europe and digging into the histories of all the countries he visits and the way the ever changing border areas between them have been affected by decisions that, typically, were made by a cast of national leaders (and their political opponents), some competent, some barely literate, but very few of whom gave much thought to the effects of their decisions on “their” subjects and countrymen.
There are some fascinating stories here: my favourite is perhaps that of a small town on the border between the Netherlands and Belgium called Baarle, where the border between the two countries meanders around constantly, in such a way that one side of residential streets could be in the Netherlands and the other Belgium. Even an individual house is divided in this way: it belonged to an elderly lady who insisted that she had “always been Belgian” and would under no circumstances enter the house from The Netherlands or consider herself Dutch. Pragmatically, the local council switched the front door and its adjoining hall window around so that the door itself was left in Belgium and the hall window (never used) in The Netherlands. There is a nice picture (all the book's illustrations were taken by the author on his travels) showing a before and after picture of the white dotted borderline's position. She was perfectly happy with this, as was everyone else. One day I must visit the place.
The book also recounts stories that show clearly that minority groups are invariably treated unfairly when borders are moved, no matter the reason (usually as a result of conflict resolution), and the practice of forced relocation – ethnic cleansing, if you prefer – is neither new nor restricted to Palestinian Arabs, Jews or anybody else. It has happened time after time across Europe, from its earliest days, through the Polish Partition at the end of the 18th century, and especially in the aftermath of both World War 1 (with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), World War 2 (with the defeat of the Third Reich) and the Fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of the Warsaw Pact alliance. Huge numbers of people, mostly refugees, were moved around from place to place in a bid to even up populations and territory and appease despots like Uncle Joe Stalin – and a high proportion of the refugees were not at all pleased with the outcome. I was surprised to learn that Britain, too, has done its share of this: when the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland was initially drawn in the 1920s, and again as a result of the Troubles and its solution in the 1990s, numbers of Catholics and Protestants were “exchanged” as part of the plans and nation building.
The overall message of the book is that the people who live and work in these border areas generally just get on with it, and live and work together as they always have done. The growth and influence of the EU, the Schengen Zone and the euro currency has made this much easier to do, with no border controls and visa requirements needed across the majority of the Continent. The village of Schengen itself is a model: it lies at the confluence of the borders of Luxembourg, Germany and France (the exact point where the borders meet is smack in the middle of the river Moselle) and while notionally in Luxembourg people live and work in their neighbouring countries and hence commute quite freely across the borders multiple times every day – and speak each others’ languages (and English) happily and interchangeably. The area is wine country: a network of foot and cycle paths spreads out across the countryside that provides a little advertised tourist attraction – another place I need to visit.
With travel and history being passions of mine, I’ve read many books and articles over the years on the subject of the changes to our Continent, and I thought I had a pretty good knowledge. But Borderlines, in approaching the subject from a slightly different angle, has added to that knowledge, and given me a lot of reading pleasure. Baston’s writing is clear and concise and the book is beautifully written. It’s a worthy addition to the genre and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
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