MixedSydney Review of Books (AU)The Books of Jacob is a book about the internet. That is to say, it’s a response to the experience of encountering information online, and realising as a result that ‘many things remain quietly connected’, as Tokarczuk writes in her postscript. This realisation in turn gives rise to the notion of the system as a whole, a kind of totality ... I like the way Tokarczuk thinks about the internet, but I’m suspicious of what the ‘internet’ stands in for in her thought, and in her writing ... My ambivalence towards Yente as a literary device was dispelled by my encounter with Tokarczuk’s essay on ognosia, which cheerfully restored Yente’s interpretability in time for me to write this review ... Reading The Books of Jacob, it sometimes feels like the work of the reader – making connections, identifying patterns, engaging with the tension between individual details and the ‘world’ of the book as a whole – is being done ‘for us’ in a way that isn’t entirely satisfying.
