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Margot_Polley
Original and Engrossing
I went back and forth between 4 or 5 stars but decided on 5 as I have never quite read anything like this. It is comedic, tragic, mysterious, weird but very engrossing and beautifully written. I totally did not see the ending coming as I was so caught up in the magical and astronomical aspects of the book. Janina is a truly memorable character.
Cathryn_Conroy
An Unconventional Literary Murder Mystery: Strange, but Highly Creative and Imaginative
This genre-defying novel by Olga Tokarczuk is a literary murder mystery and a fable and a philosophical discourse on life and death that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It is strange. Very strange. But it was also strangely good once I got into its rhythm.
The novel is charmingly told in the first person by the eccentric Janina Duszejko, an elderly woman living alone in the wilderness in a remote Polish hamlet near the Czech border. The story, which begins in winter and ends the following November, focuses on a series of unexplained deaths that look like accidents. Janina spends her days in these harsh winter months calculating horoscopes, reading and translating the poetry of William Blake, and caretaking the nearby homes that are only used in the summer months. She has a propensity of giving bizarre nicknames to those closest to her. Her only two neighbors she calls Oddball and Big Foot, while the manager of a resale store she calls Good News and a former student who regularly visits is nicknamed Dizzy.
Janina is devoted to her astrology and is convinced that she can determine an individual's date of death based on his or her horoscope. She is also devoted to animals, angrily screaming at hunters in the nearby fields and forests. In fact, Janina firmly believes that it is the animals who are murdering these men who turn up dead, taking revenge for their frequent abuse. She shares this quirky theory with others, including the police, a conversation that inevitably results in funny, furtive looks of ridicule. Janina truly thinks there is a special, almost sacred, relationship between animals and humans and that the animals understand us. Virtually no one takes her seriously. She knows that others think she is "just an old woman, gone off her rocker…useless and unimportant."
Most readers will figure out about halfway through the book not only that the deaths were not accidental and were, in fact, murders, but also the identity of the murderer. And the revelation of the murderer makes the story all that more creepy and sinister.
The style of writing was a bit off-putting to me at first, until I figured out that it is prose written in the poetic style of William Blake. That is, random words are capitalized in sentences, just as Blake did in his poetry. Each chapter begins with a few lines of Blake's poetry, making this book a love letter to the 18th century British poet and visionary. Even the title of the book is from Blake's poem "Proverbs of Hell."
This literary novel is indeed unconventional, as well as highly creative and imaginative. If you're looking for something a little different, do read it.
Sandi
take my review with a grain of salt...
3 stars Thanks to Edelweiss and Riverhead Books Publishing for the chance to read this ARC. Published August 13, 2019. This is a translated book. Originally written in Polish.
This book was so confusing for me. There were parts that I really liked and parts that frankly bored me. There were times I was happy with this book, and times I was unhappy with it. I often wonder what, if anything, gets lost in a translated book. There were no big gaps or quick turn-arounds in this book, as would be expected if the translation was not going well, so I guess it was just the varying ideas that the author put together. This book is billed as a ‘thriller cum fairy tale’. To me, that statement is confusing enough!
Another thing that I noticed early on in the book was that just from out of nowhere a word mid-sentence would be capitalized. At first that bothered me, then I just accepted it as bad editing (or poor translating) and ignored it. Sometime thereafter that practice stopped.
Janine loved astrology. (this is one place that I thought the author delved too deeply). It was obvious that Janine was a much bigger lover of animals than she was of humans. She also was the caretaker for some summer houses just outside Warsaw Poland. (‘summer houses’ being very kind – they sounded like shacks). She did however have a few permanent neighbors, who stayed year-round, that she renamed – Oddball, Dizzy and Big Foot – to match their appearances. Soon her neighbors start turning up dead and this strange little woman, who mostly keeps to herself, has a problem with getting anyone to listen to her. So, she becomes her own investigator, judge, jury and prosecutor.
I have never read this author before and am uncertain about reading another of her books. This story just seemed to come across as a poor monologue. Like it was being presented without inflection just a monotone, no change in pitch or tone. She struck one note and carried it throughout the whole book. Again, maybe a translation issue? This author is a highly regarded author in Poland and has been awarded for her translated books, so take my review with a grain of salt.
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