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A review by girlwithherheadinabook
Jacob's Folly by Rebecca Miller
4.0
Jacob's Folly begins with one of the most bewitching opening paragraphs I can remember:
I, the being in question, having spent nearly three hundred years lost as a pomegranate pip in a lake of aspic, amnesiac, bodiless and comatose, a nugget of spirit but nothing else, found myself quickening, gaining form and weight and, finally, consciousness. I did not remember dying, so my first thoughts were confused, and a little desperate.
With that, the reader is catapulted into the world of Jacob Cerf, 18th century pedlar and Jew, but he now finds himself suddenly in twenty-first century America. Has he been reincarnated? Is he a guardian angel? An encounter with a mirror reveals the terrible truth. Jacob has returned to the earth in the form of ... a house fly. Yes, Miller quite literally has a fly on the wall narrator.
The novel explores the conflict between conformity in one's culture and the desire for personal expression. Jacob had traipsed around 18th century Paris with his box of wares, always feeling an outsider in a country where he barely spoke the language and his life was governed by what he was not allowed to do. While still a teenager, he was married off to a trembling and feeble-minded little girl Hodel, who is plagued by digestive distress, all of which served to compound Jacob's woes and leads him into rebellion against his faith. Finding himself in the twenty-first century, Jacob is still fixed in his desire to undermine the faith of others. He is the devil on the shoulder, the voice whispering telling people to do what they please. He is the buzzing fly in the room, distracting his subject from their better instincts.
For my full review:
http://girlwithherheadinabook.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/review-jacobs-folly-rebecca-miller.html
I, the being in question, having spent nearly three hundred years lost as a pomegranate pip in a lake of aspic, amnesiac, bodiless and comatose, a nugget of spirit but nothing else, found myself quickening, gaining form and weight and, finally, consciousness. I did not remember dying, so my first thoughts were confused, and a little desperate.
With that, the reader is catapulted into the world of Jacob Cerf, 18th century pedlar and Jew, but he now finds himself suddenly in twenty-first century America. Has he been reincarnated? Is he a guardian angel? An encounter with a mirror reveals the terrible truth. Jacob has returned to the earth in the form of ... a house fly. Yes, Miller quite literally has a fly on the wall narrator.
The novel explores the conflict between conformity in one's culture and the desire for personal expression. Jacob had traipsed around 18th century Paris with his box of wares, always feeling an outsider in a country where he barely spoke the language and his life was governed by what he was not allowed to do. While still a teenager, he was married off to a trembling and feeble-minded little girl Hodel, who is plagued by digestive distress, all of which served to compound Jacob's woes and leads him into rebellion against his faith. Finding himself in the twenty-first century, Jacob is still fixed in his desire to undermine the faith of others. He is the devil on the shoulder, the voice whispering telling people to do what they please. He is the buzzing fly in the room, distracting his subject from their better instincts.
For my full review:
http://girlwithherheadinabook.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/review-jacobs-folly-rebecca-miller.html