“How come nobody intervenes to stop all the evil that’s rife everywhere?”
I believe we are all endlessly fascinating creatures. Sure, many of us show a“How come nobody intervenes to stop all the evil that’s rife everywhere?”
I believe we are all endlessly fascinating creatures. Sure, many of us show a pretty mundane face to the world, but underneath that we have enchanting idiosyncrasies. All of us have them, whether in our lives or our imaginations. But few have the--what is it? guts?--to sympathetically lay all that stuff out on the page for the world to see, the way Olga Tokarczuk did here. What a talent. Based on what I read in this book, she has an amazingly fascinating mind and I therefore now want to read all of her writing, past and future.
This story is about Janina Duszejko who is feeling her age. She lives in a remote village in southeastern Poland, near the border with the Czech Republic. Winters are harsh and life can be challenging. She has a number of “Ailments,” but she is a rugged individual--someone who spends her time teaching English once a week to school children, translating Blake with a young friend, watching and repairing her neighbors’ homes in their winter absence, and calculating her acquaintances astrological charts.
She frequently notes how invisible older women are in a community--nobody notices. So she goes about her business, caring for the people, plants, and animals around her. She has a particular concern for the animals, and this passion becomes the center of the novel’s action.
The uniqueness of the character and plot was fun (and frankly warming to this dog-loving vegetarian reader’s heart), but the greatness was in how much she was able to explore through it. Her thoughts on aging, self-sufficiency, the human-animal relationship, the meaning of family, who decides what matters, and even the impact of the stars on our lives, will be making my head spin for a long time.
“There are some things we may not understand, but we can sense them perfectly well.”...more
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