Encyclopedic Passion: The Fiction of Olga Tokarczuk

The winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.," the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk writes arguably the most challenging and complex fiction of our time. We will start with Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead, (translated by Atonia Lloyd Jones)  an acrid comedy that is part thriller and part rural chronicle, and then proceed to Tokarczyk’s major work, The Books of Jacob, translated by Jennifer Croft. This novel, chronicling a pseudo-messianic figure in eighteenth-century Poland who is at different times visionary and holy fool; Muslim, Catholic, and Jew; hero and villain is one of the great works of our century so far.

More details