19 Jun 2013 00:36:01
Jacob's Folly is an intriguing jewel of a novel about temptation and desire. It follows the life and reincarnation of a Jewish pedlar, Jacob Cerf. We meet Jacob at the point of his reincarnation in present-day New York, where he immediately falls in lust with 21-year-old Masha Edelman, who wants to be an actress. His chances of wooing her are limited because he realises, to his horror, that he has been reincarnated not, as he had originally hoped, as an angel, but as a fly. He has returned to Earth in this lowly form, he believes, because of the sinful life he led in 18th-century Paris – and the novel alternates Jacob's observation of 21st-century America with visits to the vividly described France of his past. Masha, the erotic and mysterious object of his desire, struggles with the practical requirements of acting and the weight of religious tradition: as a strict Torah Jew, she cannot appear on the stage. Her journey to reinvent herself echoes Jacob's own past, in which he is rescued from his street life by the Comte de Villars and transformed from an observant Talmudic Jew, attired in tzitzit and yarmulke, into a cynical, licentious Parisian footman, clad in silks and sporting a wig. The comte's experiment has a serious intention: to prove that all humans are essentially the same, irrespective of race or religious tradition. It is this key idea that Miller explores in a novel that is deft, beguiling and humorous.
