The novel itself was well received, selling 170,000 copies in hardback and winning her a second Nike award, known as “the Polish Booker”. Set on the border between modern-day Ukraine and Poland, The Books of Jacob tells the story of Jakub Frank, a Jewish-born religious leader who led the forcible conversion of fellow Jews to Catholicism in the 18th century. In Poland, Tokarczuk was branded a 'targowiczanin' – an ancient term for traitor She is currently best known in Poland for a 900-page historical epic called The Books of Jacob published in 2014 (and due out in English next year). The vagaries of English translation meant we were there to discuss a novel that was originally published in 2007. Our previous meeting was a year earlier in a Warsaw cafe, when Flights had yet to be published in the UK. Tokarczuk prefers an astronomical metaphor, explaining that, just as the ancients looked at stars in the sky and found ways to group them and then to relate them to the shapes of creatures or figures, so what she calls her “constellation novels” throw stories, essays and sketches into orbit, allowing the reader’s imagination to form them into meaningful shapes. “The book’s prose is a lucid medium in which narrative crystals grow to an ideal size, independent structures not disturbing the balance of the whole.” “It could almost be an inventory of the ways narrative can serve a writer short of, and beyond, telling a story,” he said. I meet Tokarczuk before an interview at the British Library by the critic Adam Mars-Jones, who wrote a highly complimentary review of Flights in the London Review of Books.
She has long been one of Poland’s highest profile writers – a vegetarian feminist in an increasingly reactionary, patriarchal country, and a public intellectual whose every utterance can make news headlines.įlights combines (among other things) the observations of a fretful modern traveller with the story of a wandering Slavic sect, a biography of a 17th-century Flemish anatomist and an account of the posthumous journey of Chopin’s heart from Paris, where the Polish composer died, to his desired resting place in Warsaw. The trade weekly, speaking specifically to a UK readership, can be forgiven for making such a bald assertion – even though she has had two previous novels translated into English – since it is only now that Flights has been shortlisted for the Man Booker international prize that Tokarczuk has begun to command the sort of attention in the English-speaking world that her home fans would consider her due. W hen Olga Tokarczuk’s sixth novel, Flights, was about to be published in the UK last year the Bookseller trilled that “she is probably one of the greatest living writers you have never heard of”.
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