4 minute read
trans. by Jennifer Croft
the books of jacob
THE SERPENT PAPERS
Schnader, Jeff Permanent Press (330 pp.) $29.95 | Feb. 28, 2022 978-1-57962-648-8
The protagonist of Schnader’s novel wrestles with his upbringing in 1970s New York. The questions facing J-Bee, aka Joseph Bell, are ones familiar to many angry young men as they come of age. J-Bee comes from a military family in Virginia; as his father reminds him, “I know who you are, and you’re a fighter from a long line of fighters.” J-Bee is a student at Columbia University in the early 1970s with a tumultuous inner life. This includes a propensity for righteous violence, which he engaged in as a high schooler by getting revenge on the bullies who caused the death of his deaf brother. J-Bee’s time at Columbia finds him unsure of his direction in life—he’s surrounded by the counterculture but is also courted by the Sachems, described as “a secret society of campus conservatives.” Eventually, one of his friends falls victim to the machinations of a drug dealer, and J-Bee’s penchant for revenge returns to the foreground. He also embarks on a relationship with Margo, a fellow student with a connection to Bloom, an older man who becomes a mentor to him. It gets heady at times, with J-Bee’s Catholic upbringing causing him to ponder mortal sins and a mysterious figure known as the Serpent delivering long monologues arguing for an end to political division. (Sample quote: “I tell you it’s all rhetoric, generated from a smoke screen being used to make two sides out of the same, exploited generation of men.”) The book doesn’t lack ambition, but several aspects of it, including the ups and downs of J-Bee and Margo’s relationship, feel rushed.
This ambitious novel evokes a time and place but gets tripped up in the pacing.
ONE ITALIAN SUMMER
Serle, Rebecca Atria (272 pp.) $27.00 | March 1, 2022 978-1-9821-6681-6
A 30-year-old married woman from Los Angeles, finding herself adrift after her mother’s death, travels to Italy on a long-awaited vacation they had planned to take together. Katy Silver’s one and only true love is her mother. Her mother is—was—her first call, her last call, her everything. When Carol dies after a long illness, Katy is so overcome with grief she cannot imagine continuing her life as it was. Already on leave from work to tend to her mother, she tells her husband, Eric, that she needs space and heads to the vacation in Positano, Italy, that she and her mother had been planning. The purpose of the trip had been for Katy to see for herself the location, food, and scenery of a life-changing trip Carol had taken in her youth. Once Katy arrives at the Hotel Poseidon, she locks her wedding and engagement rings and her cellphone in the hotel room’s safe and begins to wander, experiencing the timelessness of Italy. Although in this instance, that timelessness is literal. Not long after Katy’s arrival, a younger version of Carol appears. The two strike up a friendship, and Katy leans into this unexpected—and inexplicable—time with her mother. She also leans into a potential are-they-or-aren’tthey-going-to-do-it romance with Adam, another guest at the hotel. This is a story about how Katy tries to discover who she is as a person and what she wants once she is away from her mother’s wide-ranging opinions and expertise and her husband’s love, calmness, and happiness with routine. What Katy finds is that her mother isn’t who she thought she was, but then again, neither is she.
An unconventional love story that embraces people’s flaws and selfishness as part of what makes them human.
THE BOOKS OF JACOB
Tokarczuk, Olga Trans. by Jennifer Croft Riverhead (992 pp.) $35.00 | Feb. 1, 2022 978-0-593-08748-0
A charismatic figure traverses Europe, followers in tow. The latest novel by the Polish Nobel Prize winner to appear in English is a behemoth, both in size and subject matter: At nearly 1,000 pages, the book tackles the mysteries of heresy and faith, organized religion and splinter sects, 18thcentury Polish and Lithuanian history, and some of the finer points of cabalist and Hasidic theology. At its center is the historical figure Jacob Frank, who, in the mid-1750s, was believed to be the Messiah by a segment of Jews in what is now Ukraine. Jacob preached that the end times had come and that morality, as embodied by the Ten Commandments, had been turned on its head. He led his followers to convert first to Islam and then, later, to Christianity. He himself was accused of heresy by all three major groups. Tokarczuk’s account is made up of short sections that alternate among various points of view. These include some of Jacob’s followers, a bishop with a gambling problem, a noblewoman who self-interestedly supports the “Contra-Talmudists’ ” attempt to convert to Christianity, and Jacob’s grandmother Yente, who is neither dead nor entirely alive, a state that allows her consciousness to roam widely, observing the novel’s action. Gritty details about the realities of daily life at the time alternate with dense passages in which Jacob’s followers argue about theology. “The struggle is about leaving behind that point where we divide everything into evil and good,” one says, “light and darkness, getting rid of all those foolish divisions and from there starting a new order all over again.” The book (which has been beautifully translated into
