First the immediate things you notice. The massive book that you can hardly hold. The quaint numbering of pages, decreasing rather than increasing, as we do in the West. Then you find out this is a Jewish custom.
The book, by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Olga Tokarczuk, has just appeared in a very good translation by Jennifer Croft and rewards the reader after making him or her struggle through all these pages.
One also reads the book while keeping an eye on what is happening in Ukraine because the book is set in the wide area now being fought over, Poland and Ukraine and Lithuania and also Turkey.
That was known as Greater Poland or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which existed in the 18th century.
The appearance of the book was controversial in Poland and caused an internet hate and harassment campaign. Outside Poland, the book has been less controversial but at times quite mystifying.
The book is about a charismatic self-proclaimed messiah, Jacob Frank, a young Jew who travels through the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, attracting and repelling crowds and authorities in equal measure.
Throngs of disciples follow him as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as a Messiah while wreaking havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumours of his sect's secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs.
The book is an unruly, overwhelming, vastly eccentric novel, sophisticated and ribald and brimming with folk wit. It is said he has two penises but can retract one when two seem like a handful. He can also make women pregnant just by looking at them.
Many other characters spin in orbit around him. There are wives and lovers and misfits and hangers-on.
Two supporting characters are particularly important. One is Nathan, a rabbi who becomes the chronicler, whose wife despises Jacob and vice-versa.
And Yente, a very old woman who somehow defies death and sees everything as through a long lens.
There are also misanthropic doctors and bishops with gambling debts. The comedy in this novel blends with genuine tragedy: torture, betrayal, imprisonment and death. As it does in life...