I'd started to put on my boots, but that terrible gray morning alarmed me. I'd called her, annoye at letting myself be led up the garden path so easily, and helpless in the path of the sinister workings of bondage. She is quite alone and saddened when she tries to save an abused animal which returns to its abusive home when she opens her door. The mention of Medea is particularly significant in what follows. Sometimes I think it's something like Irmtrude too. I think my real name is Emily, or Joanna. I regard that the one that's written on my identity card as scandalously wrong for me and unfair - Janina. It was quite straightforward - it suggested itself to me when I saw his footprints in the snow.Unfortunately, I couldn't choose a suitable name for myself. The naming of Big Foot occured in a similar way. Janine hates her name and loves giving her own names to folks in her life: A woman we would pass on the street and ignore, like many do in the telling of the tale, much to their own disadvantage. What makes this novel stand out is precisely its unusual protagonist: single, eccentric, living in the woods with her astrology. Never underestimate the strength and fortitude of middle-age ladies. It shouldn't be a surprise though - this is her destiny, after all. Olga Tokarczuk, 2018 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has truly impressed me. You sort of know what's happening, but need to see it played out, the way it was written in the stars, for better or worse. It's this crash course that drives the reader through these pages. The unstoppable universe, with everyone's fate, on a crash course. The solitary steps of one going against the tide. The loneliness experienced by a group of misfits. The cruelty of the elements, of seclusion. Janina is someone I will not soon forget.Īt the same time, this book is dark and tinged throughout with death. The way she capitalizes certain words, assigns her own names to people, ponders the proverbs of William Blake (where the fabulous title of this novel originates). I enjoyed being in the head of this marvellously unreliable narrator, smirked at her many amusing observations, her interactions with the people in her life and the natural world. Is it because Saturn is in the 8th house? Or because the animals have had enough, at long last? A middle aged woman in rural Poland, a woman who is best described as eccentric (obsessed with astrology, plagued by "ailments" both physical and psychological), finds herself in the middle of something of a murder mystery. These questions are asked in a most unique way. Asks the same questions that Dostoevsky asks in Crime and Punishment - who has the right to live? who has the right to kill? and what's the difference between a poacher and a hunter, anyway? (that last question is Tokarczuk's, not Dostoevsky's.)
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