The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

Does everyone see the colour green the same? Or is ‘green’ maybe just a name we use as if it were a paint to coat completely distinct experiences in order to communicate, when in reality every one of us is viewing something different? Is there not some way this can be verified?

Under what rubric were we to place hunger and bodily injury, and the slaughter of animals, and children felled by the plague and laid row upon row in the earth? In such instances, I was never able to shake the impression that ultimately, and irrefutably, God must not give a damn about us.

unwed Jew is no one, and he will be taken seriously by no one. And

To be foreign is to be free. To have a great expanse stretch out before you – the desert, the steppe. To have the shape of the moon behind you like a cradle, the deafening symphony of the cicadas, the air’s fragrance of melon peel, the rustle of the scarab beetle when, come evening, the sky turns red, and it ventures out onto the sand to hunt. To have your own history, not for everyone, just your own history written in the tracks you leave behind. To feel like a guest everywhere you go, occupying homes just for a while, not bothering about the garden, enjoying the wine without forming any attachment to the vineyard. Not to understand the language, and therefore to register gestures and faces better, the expressions in people’s eyes, the emotions that appear on faces like the shadows of clouds. To learn a foreign language from scratch, a little bit in every place, comparing words and finding orders of similarity.

Asher has learned that people have a powerful need to feel superior to others. It doesn’t matter who they are – they have to find someone who’s beneath them. Who is better and who is worse depends on a vast array of random traits. Those with light-coloured eyes consider themselves to be above those with dark-coloured eyes. The dark-eyed, meanwhile, look down on the light-eyed. Those who live near the forest’s edge feel superior to those living in the open on the ponds, and vice versa. The peasants feel superior to the Jews, and the Jews feel superior to the peasants. Townspeople think they’re better than the inhabitants of villages, and people from villages treat city people as though they were somehow worse. Isn’t this the very glue that holds the human world together? Isn’t this why we need other people, to give us the pleasure of knowing we are better than they are?