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• Muy lento, aún no he conseguido terminar de leerlo.

• The book is fully detailed page after page, but confusing with so many people and really boring

• One of the most peculiar and memorable books I've ever read. Also one of the most difficult to read. It is a long, amazing trip to eastern Europe in the 18th century, the tale of Jacob Frank, a Jewish messiah, who created a new religion and told his follows that they were obligated to break as many moral boundaries as possible. The narrator, Yente, is a dead woman and the pages are numbered backwards from 892. A sampling of my favorite passages: "There is something wonderful in being a stranger, in being foreign, something to be relished, something as alluring as sweets. It is good not to be able to understand a language, not to know the customs, to glide like a spirit among others who are distant and unrecognizable. Then a particular kind of wisdom awakens -- an ability to surmise, to grasp the things that aren't obvious. Cleverness and acumen come about. A person who is a stranger gains a point of view, becomes, whether he likes it or not, a particular type of sage. Who was it who convinced us that being comfortable and familiar was so great.? Only foreigners can truly understand the way things work." p. 374 "But then I thought that one would be a fool to expect people to remain as they once were, and that it is a kind of overpridefulness in us to treat ourselves as constant wholes, as if we were always the same person, for we are not." p. 200 "For when the spirit enters into a person, it happens as if by violence, as if the air were to penetrate the hardest stone." p. 198 "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. Such order tends to overburden the mind, which cannot know how to respond. Chaos has always seemed more familiar and safe, like the disarray in your own drawer." p. 163 "Either the real or the intelligible universe has infinite points of view from which it can be represented, and the possible systems of human knowledge are as numerous as those points of view." p. 143 [quote from Diderot] "The Ascherbachs don't care about being paid from their writing, of course -- they are doing perfectly well as it is. It is more a need, a kind of calling -- to polish words so that it will be possible to see through them clearly." p. 141 "The truth is like a gnarled tree, made up of many layers that are twisted all around each other, some layers holding others inside them, and sometimes being held. The truth is something that can be expressed in many tales, for it is like that garden the sages entered, in which each of them saw something else." p. 79 "In this sense, death doesn't really exist, thinks Ascher -- no one has ever described the experience. It's always someone else's death, a stranger's. There is no sense in being scared of it, since what we would be scared of it ... is something other than what it really is. We are afraid of an imagined death (or Death), a thing that is a product of our mind, a tangle of thoughts, tales, rituals. It is the contractual sadness, the agreed upon caesura, that introduces order into human lives." p. 68 "There is no final exhalation, Ascher thinks with mounting rage, no soul slips out the body. Quite the contrary, the body sticks the soul inside it, so it can carry it into the grave. he has seen this so many times, but only now has he fully comprehended it. Just like that. There is no final exhalation. There is no soul." . p. 66 "Yeruchim, when he succeeded at it, would giggle, and it would seem to me that was exactly how God had giggled when he had created us all. ... it appealed to me to travel back, in memory, because the past remained alive for me, while the present was barely breathing, and the future lay before me like a cold corpse." p. 51 "The truth of the world is not matter, but the vibration of the sparks of light, that constant flickering that is located in every last thing." p. 48 "The only thing Yante can think of that is like this is tracks in the snow -- since the dead lose their ability to read, one of death's most unfortunate consequences ... There can be no doubt that the world is made of darkness. Now we find ourselves on the side of darkness." p. 27 (the last page).

• É, digamos, uma aventura ler The Book of Jacob, o romance monumental da Nobel polonesa Olga Tokarczuk. São quase mil páginas – contadas em ordem decrescente – de uma história com uma centena de personagens que entram e saem, viagens por vários países da Europa do século XVIII, um messias, um grupo de judeus que se convertem, uma idosa que se recusa a morrer e vira um cristal, e os tais livros de Jacob. Mais próximo, na forma, de Correntes do que de Sobre os Ossos, The Books of Jacob é um livro que faz da diáspora seu modo de narrar. Tokarczuk vaga de lado para lado, traz e abandona personagens, e cria uma história épica que parece ter como centro religião e como essa pode moldar o pensamento de uma era, mas que, no fundo, é sobre a existência humana em tempos conturbados – e quando não o são? Apesar de já ser século XVIII, uma espécie de pensamento medieval ainda pesa sobre as personagens e as ações. Jacob Frank e as pessoas que o cercam – de familiares a detratores, passando por amigos e admiradores – são figuras que, às vezes, se tornam simbólicas, mas, ainda nesses momentos, são dotadas de profunda humanidade em suas jornadas em busca do sentido da existência humana, da existência de Deus, o sentido da religião, da vida e da morte, a possibilidade da redenção... É um livro que se encaixa perfeitamente na obra da escritora – ao mesmo tempo que é diferente de tudo o que ela fez. The Book of Jacob ressignifica a palavra obra-prima. O tamanho e os temas assustam, mas é um livro que se lê com prazer e certa “facilidade” – sua estrutura beira um épico de aventura, a narrativa é muito vívida. Ao evitar contar a vida de Jacob do berço ao leito de morte de forma linear, a autora encontra caminhos por onde fazer digressões e trazer questões que ressoam ao presente. Ela escreve sobre o passado, mas ilumina o nosso tempo. De qualquer forma, não é um livro para se começar a ler Tokarczuk, mas é um livro que merece ser lido.

• Take this book into your hands when you have plenty of time. The volume is huge and you will do a lot of research while reading it. 962 pages and it starts from 962 going down to one. Search for the KAPANCI and KARAKAS families from Salonica. A con man or a saint? Olga is huge. I highly recommend it.

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