How long does it take to read Jacob the Liar?
Jurek Becker
Jacob the Liar by Jurek Becker takes about 4 hours 56 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 56 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1969. 269 pages, about 73,975 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 13 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 56 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 5 minutes |
The page count is the median across 43 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Acclaimed as the most remarkable novel of the Holocaust ever written in Germany, Jacob the Liar breaks with the genre's tradition of unremitting realism to offer a suspenseful and masterfully crafted tale of hope, desire, and the life-giving force of fiction. In the ghetto, the possession of a radio is punishable by death. Like thousands of his fellow prisoners, Jacob Heym is cut off from all news of the war - until he is arrested one evening and brought to the German military office, where he overhears a broadcast report of the Red Army's advance to a city some 300 miles away. Miraculously, he is allowed to return to his quarters, but when he tries to spread the good news, he discovers the only way to make people believe him is to tell a lie: "How do I know? I have a radio!" Inevitably, one lie leads to another, and before long Jacob finds himself feeding the entire ghetto fabricated reports of the Russians' advance - reports that save lives when, under the shock of renewed hope, suicides cease and the people of the ghetto take heart. Jacob is a hero and a liar. But how long can his web of lies hold? . Here for the first time is Leila Vennewitz's authorized translation of this classic novel, which won the Heinrich Mann Prize for fiction and Switzerland's Charles Veillon Award.
Subjects: Jews, Fiction, Fiction, historical, general, Fiction, media tie-in, Jews, fiction, Germany, fiction
