I am very behind on posting, but in the meantime, here’s a review of Jenny Croft’s translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob that I wrote for the Asymptote blog!
I wrote an academic essay about the novel a year ago, thinking about it in relation to her other novel, Flights, and how both of them are books that aspire to depict an entire world, and focusing especially on what I think is a really innovative use of free indirect discourse in Books of Jacob. And I keep thinking about the relationship between this review and that essay — that is, between my writing for an academic audience and for a public one. I had been thinking that the academic essay was straightforward enough for a general reader, but probably more in the weeds of how the book works than most people would care to be. But I gave it to my parents to read, and they were like, whoa, it’s interesting, but a bit above our paygrade. So now I’m thinking I had it backward — that actually, the topic would be of interest to the broader public, I’d just need to explain it more clearly. I didn’t ultimately do that in my review, but in a longer review-essay, I might have…
Maybe that’s obvious. I’ve been thinking a lot about what “the public” wants from literary criticism — probably overthinking it really. Especially as I’ve been doing more of it! But most of what I’ve been writing has been short, in the neighborhood of 1,000-1,500 words, for the simple reason that something longer would mean going beyond a cursory discussion of the book as a whole, and would therefore require having a better sense of what people want to hear more about…
Kasia Reads 