Jacob the Mutant

by Mario Bellatin

Conceived of as a set of fragmentary manuscripts from an unpublished Joseph Roth novel, Jacob the Mutant is a novella in a perpetual state of transformation — a story about a man named Jacob, an ersatz rabbi and owner of a roadside tavern. But when reality shifts, so does Jacob, mutating into another person entirely.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Latin American, Novella

132 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2004

About the author

Mario Bellatin grew up in Peru as the son of Peruvian parents. He spent two years studying theology at the seminary Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo and graduated from the University of Lima. In 1987, Bellatin moved to Cuba, where he studied screenplay writing at the International Film School Latinoamericana. On his return to Mexico in 1995, he became the director of the Department of Literature and Humanities at the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana and became a member of the National System of Creators of Mexico from 1999 to 2005. He is currently the director of the School of Writers Dynamics in Mexico City.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jacob the Mutant is a postmodernistic literary mystification. It’s one of the weirdest tales I’ve ever read.
Mario Bellatin takes fragments of the nonexistent unfinished novel by Joseph Roth – which he had been ostensibly writing only in the state of complete inebriation – and starts analyzing the imagined text the way Jorge Luis Borges used to do…

One of the most surprising discoveries for literature, not just for that of Joseph Roth but for all of twentieth-century literature, seems to be in the mechanism for how a role assigned to a particular character drifts, quite suddenly, into another, completely different one. Precisely when the reader assumes, quite plausibly, not just Jacob Pliniak’s presence in the text but, especially, his right to remain in its structure, our character transforms, with no great leap, into his supposed adopted daughter, Rose Plinianson, the highest authority of the women’s committee in the town where she lives.

The self-styled rabbi, Jacob Pliniak, during his ritual ablution in a lake, suddenly finds himself reincarnated in his adopted eighty-year-old daughter in the certain moment of the future. So now this catholic woman’s main purpose becomes to construct a golem and destroy all the dance academies of her hometown…

The out of the ordinary fact described by Joseph Roth occurs when Jacob Pliniak submerges in the lake to carry out his daily ritual ablutions. Instants later he returns to the surface, having transformed into his own daughter. But not into the girl that we’ve known until now, but rather into an elderly woman, eighty years of age. Jacob Pliniak has acquired the body of an old woman, in whose memory the existence of a Jacob Pliniak is perhaps logged, a dead man that drowned while performing his ablutions in a lake upon whose shores he built his house. It’s important to point out that in the Kabbalah these transformations that entail person, gender, and time are referred to as “Aphoristic Pools.”

The second half of the novelette becomes even more bizarre – Mario Bellatin begins to analyze Jacob the Mutant adding there even more preposterous details and making sectarian beliefs of different religions collide.
Writers, similar to God, move in mysterious ways.

[Kuszma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I.
"A mariótikus elmélet Sül Mester felfogásában a következő:

Olyan esemény, amelynek során ha a legkisebb és legelszigeteltebb cselekmény megtöri a megszokott rendet, irányíthatatlan káosz és egyre abszurdabb események láncolata keletkezik."

II.
"Mindig folyamatos mutációban lévő olvasónak kell maradni."

III.
"Az egyetlen dolog, amiben talán biztosak lehetünk az, hogy a tevék puszta szemlélése által rájöttem: a nagyapám egy száműzött nyelv örököse, és sohasem vett volna fel egy patkánybőrből varrott cipőt."

Ritkán szoktam irodalomtudományt olvasni, tán mert állandó időzavarban lévő, viszont önmagával folyamatosan versenyt futó olvasóként úgy vélem, más emberek könyvekről alkotott véleményének megismerése csak elvenné az időt attól, hogy ugyanezekről a könyvekről saját véleményt alkossak. Ami nyilván nem azt jelenti, hogy a magam véleményét többre tartanám az övéknél, csak hát szerintem az irodalomnak pont az a lényege, hogy mindenki a maga olvasatának kovácsa legyen. (Amiről aztán persze lehet élvezetes vitákat folytatni, de az más kérdés.)

Ugyanakkor valamiért nagyon vonzanak a szövegek, amelyek nem létező szövegekről szólnak - azok a regények, amelyek kvázi irodalomtudománynak maszkírozták magukat. Bellatin könyve is így indul, mégpedig kirívóan sunyi módon egy létező, valóban rejtélyes író (Joseph Roth) befejezetlen könyvéről kíván beszélni - amely könyv olyannyira befejezetlen, hogy konkrétan el se kezdték. Amit körül lehet írni a "nem létezik" szókapcsolattal is - de ennek kiderítéséhez azért kell guglizni pár kört. Ez a szövegrész megtévesztésig hasonlít ahhoz, amit irodalomtudománynak nevezünk. Jelek persze vannak - elsősorban az, hogy még a legelvetemültebb egyetemi rektor se merészelné hanyagolni a szakaszolást, és egyetlen masszív, húsz oldalas bekezdésben a világ elé tárni meglátásait egy regényről. Szaporodnak az elszólások is - a szerző (akinek személye - jó posztmodern szokás szerint - egyre kevésbé világos) például hivatkozik holmi elveszett levelekre, holott - mint az köztudott - az elveszett levelekre nem szokás hivatkozni, tekintve, hogy el vannak veszve.

Aztán a rejtélyes szerző egyszeriben elkezd szétesni, és húzza maga után a szöveget is. Innentől egyre kevésbé lehetséges a művet belegyömöszölni a merev kategóriák valamelyikébe - egyfajta pszichedelikus-kabbalista látomássá válik, amelyben az egyre inkább sarlatánnak tűnő fiktív irodalomtudós elkezdi megfejteni a nem létező szöveg elveszett (ellopott? eltitkolt?) fejezeteit, miközben mellesleg nagyapjáról delirál. Mindezt egy szúfi meditáció keretein belül. És ezt az egészet aztán még megfejeljük egy fordítói utószóval - értjük, a nem létező könyvnek még van egy nem létező fordítója is! -, ami aztán tényleg hemzseg a szereptévesztéstől: hisz ez a fordító az "igazságot" keresi a szövegben, holott a fordító ne keressen semmit: hanem fordítson! (Ráadásul meg van győződve róla, hogy ő egy Rose Eigen nevű személy reinkarnációja. Na, hát ennyit erről.)

Bellatin nem törekszik arra, hogy metafizikai krimibe menjen át, és igazából az atmoszférateremtés sem különösebben érdekli. Egyszerűen csak alkot egy szöveget, ami önmaga folyamatos mutálódásában gyönyörködik, és erre csábítja olvasóját is. Amit valahol végtelenül öncélúnak érzek - de semmi bajom nincs az öncélú prózákkal. Feltéve, ha bravúrosak. Szóval tetszett.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Could it be real? They would ask each other without ever really, of course, agreeing.

I went to hear Bellatin when he was in San Francisco last week. Entertaining, even if I had to wait for the translation of his remarks. Author , translator and artist were all present and thoroughly enjoying their tongue in cheek insistence that the work really is the pastiche it claims to be.

The narrative supposedly by Roth is mind-bendingly protean. Characters do indeed mutate into other characters, inhabit two continents in the same sentence, and carry on incredibly for a rabbi and his wife in the early 20th century on the border of Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I've only read Job by Roth, but that book makes sense as the point of departure for this work, as it also involves an Eastern European Jew who ends up, amid disasters, in America.

At this point things really start to get confusing.

The middle section is the best. (It comes after the 'introduction' explaining 'Roth's' found fragments of the work 'Jacob the Mutant', then a section of those fragments (sort of.) This middle section starts out as a sequence of cryptic, still bizarre observations but gradually ripens into a reflection on borders, Judaism, mysticism and the means to reach a state of ecstasy, the horrors of the 20th century, chance, brotherhood, what generations pass on to their descendants, and more.

Jacob continued to teach his pupils, to whom he had the habit of repeating, among other things, that any person who engaged with the Torah was capable of accepting the idea that he had the strength necessary to sustain the world on his own.

Bellatin uses a heap of repeating events, objects and actions, particularly marital infidelity, the zoo, and dance, as armature for this discussion. Some of them are from 'Roth's' fragmentary work and some from the narrator's (named Bellatin) past and some from the 'translator's' past. (At the SF talk the actual translator, David Shook, had the hardest time keeping a straight face at the charade of this 'actual' translator Jacob Steinberg (another 'Jacob', note) who has 'written' the last section of the book.).

At any rate, through the middle section ('written' by 'Bellatin') the tangle of the fragments in the 'Roth' section gain sense and meaning. I think it makes sense to read the whole work through, then to go back and read this section again.

Another recurring motif is:

The Mariotic Theory, according to Master Porcupine:

Something that occurs each time a minimal, isolated incident breaks with an established order, followed by the emergence of a chain of uncontrollable chaos and increasingly absurd acts.

.

It should be noted that Bellatin has apparently perpetrated some absurd sort of performance art events himself. Or at least he claimed to in his talk. It's not clear where 'fact' and fiction are in his case.

Also, the map/diagrams, allegedly originally sketched by the illustrator just to help her untangle the impossibly contradictory 'plot', are wonderful. I wish they could be larger, but perhaps it is in this book that I read a reference to Walser's teeny writing recently, so they may be small on purpose.

Finally, you might check the website of The Center for the Art of Translation in a couple of weeks to see if they post a podcast of the SF event.

http://www.catranslation.org

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

mario bellatin's jacob the mutant (jacobo reloaded) is an innovative, metafictional, amalgamous novella. the acclaimed mexican/peruvian writer's english audience continues to grow with each well-acclaimed, if elusive book.

jacob the mutant has at its crux, the border, an untranslated work by austrian author joseph roth. in bellatin's story, roth's piece is about a transmuting rabbi (though, in reality, roth's story apparently was about something entirely different). the second part of bellatin's book, "could there have been a reason for writing jacob the mutant?" reveals a seemingly autobiographical take on the author's grandfather and the ways in which jacob's story may well mirror his own. the third part, "affairs with respect to jacob the mutant that it would be good not to forget or leave to chance" begins:

it seems important to me that any interested party, having arrived at this point of the book jacob the mutant as of the text that attempts to respond to the relevance of having written it, keep in mind a set of elements that i, as author, hold under consideration.

this third part continues the narrative that began in the second. the book concludes with an afterword by translator jacob steinberg, "the diary of rose eigen," where steinberg outlines the similarities between bellatin's fictional account and his own personal history.

jacob the history is a strange, shifting, yet rewarding little book (perhaps not unlike something borges and aira would have released had they had the chance to collaborate). bellatin will certainly not appeal to everyone, but there is a novelty and singular vision in his work that makes his writing inexplicably irresistible.


*translated from the spanish by poet and critic jacob steinberg

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for this stuff, a meta-text about a fictitious book. Pale Fire, Borges, La literatura nazi en las Américas, even some parts of Don Quixote... I love them. And you say that there are also unexplained photos, a la Sebald? I'm so there. Take my money.

Similar to Salón de belleza, this work is super short--clocking in at under 70 pages, it's a novella. That brief duration, as well as its allusions to Jewish mysticism and repeated references to larger, unresolved mysteries, deeply indebt it to Borges. We vaguely trace the compositional history of a previously-untranslated novel, read bits of biography about the troubled author, and learn about certain parts of the novel itself. Similar to Pale Fire, the unnamed narrator makes large jumps when asserting the significance and meaning of certain passages. It's a commentary on exegesis, the work of editing, and reception.

Out of the ordinary? Yes. Open more questions than it answers? Yup. Worth a read? Definitely.

[Robbie Bruens]

One of the stranger books I have encountered. Oneiric, incantatory, and almost abrasively repetitious, this slim work combines a fictionalized summary and set of fragments from an unpublished (and actually nonexistent, I think) Joseph Roth novel called "The Border" and a set of discrete, sequenced reflections on that novel and on the author's memory of his grandfather and his grandfather's fevered ramblings at a zoo. The zoo is one of the central images, figuring into the author's memories with his grandfather and also in the book within the book, where it is referred to as the Tiny Nocturnal Zoo, and is apparently a cover for a tavern that is in itself a cover for a pogrom refugee smuggling operation. Any attempt to describe the contents of Jacob the Mutant is bound to be somewhat frustrating and circuitous. The whole thing often feels like a goof on the reader and the reader's attempt to find meaning or pattern in the text. Particularly when Bellatin brings in Bruce Lee and the Chinese mafia late in the text. It's as if he'll throw whatever he wants into the blender just to fuck around. And then it gets all religious. There are prayers in the book, and extended references to religious rituals and practices. There's a description of a small town that inexplicably includes dozens of dance academies. This is either a way to rupture traditions or return to them. Everything is contradictory to some extent. It's playful in how it mutates. This is the kind of book that you will either hate or find revelatory. I think it did both for me.

[paul holzman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upon buying this particular book it proceeded to sit on my shelf for 5 months and few weeks. I gave my time to read Joseph Roth and search for his book, The Border. I didn't find it– after all– and bought a book of Roth's that appealed most to my gusto. Never have I read it still, but I was driven to pick up "Jacobo El Mutante." I have been opened to a new world of learning the beauty of creation, imagination, how the individual is capable of transformation and adaptation, both externally and internally, and furthermore, of the ingenuity of Bellatin's literature as he invites the reader to participate in his creation.

[Richard]

This brief volume is very strange in a delightful if ominous fashion.

Everything in the book is "mutant," starting with the origin, some manuscripts of "an unfinished novel by Joseph Roth," written when he was totally inebriated, hence, not himself. Divided into four major sections re-presented by two maps (another mutation), and a repeated section, "The Wait": "The forms remained in suspense. The men's skin perpetually wet. A golem. A dozen boiled eggs. No mutation was produced. All that appeared was some sheep grazing on rocks" (pp. 3, 17 (added sentence ". . . eggs. The Stroemfeld publishing house's employee trying to blot out the traces of the text. All. . . .)," 115 (repeating 17).

Characters, too, change, including, of course, Jacob the Mutant, into Rose Plinianson. in one of his ritual baths. Jacob's role is as a sometime rabbi whose wife keeps his small tavern, The Border, an oddity remarked upon in the text, which contains a "Tiny Nocturnal Zoo." The tavern itself serves as a stopping-off place for those rescued from pogroms in the nearby country. The story is oddly humorous until new officials turn up in the streets and, eventually, the townspeople are gathered in Nazi fashion and sent off on trains. Jacob, whose wife has run away with her tavern assistant Anselm, is missed because, in his depressed (?) state, he sleeps for days at a time.

The story, told and told again in slightly readjusted (mutated) fashion, offers a weird fascination; through its repetitions and shifting points of view, it does stay with the reader. "The Translator's Afterword" (pp. 119-32) adds another level of strangeness to the text, the translator seeing himself as being a reincarnation of Rose Eigen; he writes: "the only mechanism for making sense of Jacob the Mutant was to give in to its perpetual state of transformation. To remain always a reader in continuous mutation" (p. 131). Isn't this what reading achieves?

[Giovanni Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

"No se produce ninguna mutación"

[K's Bognoter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fiktion forklædt som litteraturhistorie og religiøst inspireret litterær eksegese. Den litterære spasmager Mario Bellatin fortsætter sin selvrefererende leg med historiske, litterære og personlige sandheder og andre konstruktioner. Denne gang i en personlig, religiøst inspireret fortolkning af et fiktivt, ufuldendt værk af den østrigske forfatter Joseph Roth
Læs hele min anmeldelse her: https://bognoter.dk/2019/09/11/mario-...

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my god. Hilarious. Crazy. Meta-fiction. I don't who is real in this short novel. The author? the translator? I know Joseph Roth is real. Crazy ass book. Short and wise. Nice messing with narrative style, texture and readers expectations.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It was a situation for which the words written by that author would give rise to facts that indeed lay beyond the logic of things, but not beyond their nature."

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jacob the Mutant is constructed as an analysis of fragments found in Joseph Roth’s papers of an unpublished work that he only worked on while inebriated. The characters transform into other characters and the narrative switches settings without warning, but that makes sense because all that survives is fragments and we don’t know what’s in between. Our main character is Jacob Pliniak, a Rabbi in eastern europe who runs a tavern disguised as a Tiny Nocturnal Zoo which is actually a cover for his operation to assist people escaping pogroms. Then suddenly he transforms into Rose Plinianson, who is his own stepdaughter, and she lives in the US and her town is undergoing a plague of dance schools popping up everywhere. Other characters transform into similarly unrelated analogues. The narrator, the author Mario Bellatin, intersperses all of this with his memories of going to the zoo with his grandfather, who told him stories with characters that also happened to have all the same names as the characters in the Roth fragments. On top of all this, we get to the translator’s note at the end and the translator who is also named Jacob says that he was excited to work on this book because he is the reincarnation of his own great grandmother, Rose, who shares many characteristics with Jacob Pliniak’s wife. This all sounds confusing and it is but there are helpful maps/diagrams and the writing is very repetitive so that you don’t forget who’s who.

I have to admit that I didn’t know who Joseph Roth was until I was halfway through the book, and I only found out through sheer coincidence. I finished Blackfishing the IUD by Caren Beilin the other day, and while I was reading that I had made a list of every reference I didn’t know. I went back and looked up everything on the list. I was surprised to see a “Joseph Roth” on there, because I was also halfway through a book called Jacob the Mutant which was a collection of fragments by a fictional (so I thought) author also named Joseph Roth. What a coincidence! Of course, in the process of looking him up I realized his bio matched the book and the Roth was actually real. Serendipitous indeed, what are the odds of this.

Before this discovery, I had assumed the forward was fictional like a Borges story that's written in the style of literary analysis and the author is also a character. I would have probably assumed the translator was also a fictional character and they all existed only in the world of the book, because the translator’s note fits in too perfectly. I guess it doesn’t really matter either way, whether real or fictional it is serving the same purpose of having the author and translator and Joseph Roth living both inside and outside of the text, at least in my imagination. But I started looking at the translator’s instagram and he posts about his journey to find his great grandma and studies Kabbalah, I’m like damn this shit is like an ARG how can the metatextual elements be soooooo perfect????

Sometimes I feel sad to not get to read things in their original language but sometimes I think translation actually adds something to it, like in this book it added a whole other layer that wouldn’t have happened if the text was only in Spanish. And the act of translation itself harkens back to the book's themes of transformation. And there’s a lot in the book about language and losing Yiddish to English, and Jacob’s cousin’s boat docks in Veracruz, who is implied to be an ancestor of Mario Bellatin, who ofc writes in Spanish. This whole thing is magic tbh!

Eggs Golems Sheep Dancing is banned in the village but becomes nearly a scourge in the US town, “According to tradition, dancing and clapping helped because a kind of mystical wind would blow through the heart that would help the participating souls reach the highest point that could be reached while on Earth” 90. Religious Conversion Jewish Mysticism Sefirot Ablution Water Transformation Bathing in the Sea Sufism being closer to God if you do the rituals of bathing with clothes (purification) and/or dancing

When you repeat a story so many times it becomes a part of your memory as if it actually happened, and it may as well have because it’s equally vivid as your “real” memories. A fictional story becoming a real memory. Remembering things you are certain are true even when presented with direct evidence to the contrary– like faith but in reverse.

[muriel berdejo · Rating 4 out of 5]

esto que está aconteciendo ahora mismo en mi cabeza es una experiencia singular. hace poco leí placeres (también de mario bellatin) e igual lo terminé (y comencé), no en un día, en una madrugada, y con éste sucedió igual, en un instante. no me explico cómo es una lectura que, pues, puedo terminar en un par de horas, pero podría leerlo cada día, leerlo y leerlo y leerlo y ni siquiera sé si sacaría interpretaciones distintas o resolvería enigmas, pero es una escritura tan extraña, no sabría ni por dónde describirla. es como si las palabras fuesen otras, el idioma fuese otro. aunque lea agua o tierra o piel, no consigo entender aquello, ni siquiera podría decir que el significado es distinto, es sólo que, no sé, no lo entiendo, pero creo que es precioso. me toca devolverlo la siguiente semana, ¿y no sé si leerlo otra vez? tal vez

[David Macpherson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of games of translation, transformation and spotty recollection. There is a lot of interest in the book, and i just didnt buy it. I found the tricks tedious after a while and then when the translator's not e became part of the book, I was not charmed but annoyed. The games played just were not to my liking.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This fascinated me, though I did end up pretty confused trying to follow all the mutations and the layers of narrative/narrative reality mixes. I'd need to spend a long time going back through it to do it real justice. So complex for such a short work.

[Andres · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conociendo al autor, queda la duda de si "Frontera" de Joseph Roth existió alguna vez. Sin duda, el teólogo en Mario Bellatin sale a relucir haciendo las observaciones sobre la mencionada obra de Roth y sus implicaciones místicas y religiosas.

[Meika · Rating 5 out of 5]

At times confusing and generously wise, this book was a wonder to immerse myself in.

[Damian Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm tempted to add a fifth star for the illustrations alone. They are sublime.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read it once, in only one direction. I'll read again, in multiple directions. It's described as fragmentary, repeatedly. But I suspect that repeated readings - starting in various places, stages, and personas of Jacob, Rose, and visitors to the Tiny Nocturnal Zoo - will make the tiny novel feel multi-faceted instead. I look forward to each mutation.

[Donavan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Transformation and fluid links.

[Christopher Rey]

It's enjoyable to share this book with a loved one, reading in succession. It facilitates the level of trust needed to take the internal-whirling of sentence and plot at face value. I kept on waiting for a deeper darkness to penetrate the novella, but that's because I had previously read the vastly superior "Salon de Belleza" prior to Jacob the Mutant.