One of the insightful things about reading a digital book is that it tracks how much time you spend reading it. I first opened this book 1 week ago and I spent 8 hours and 42 minutes reading the novel. It didn’t feel like almost 9 hours, but it is surprising how much time you can accumulate reading in moments when you are waiting in the car for your wife, shopping and IKEA and trying to falling asleep.
The two things I most like about Tokarczuk is she is a beautiful writer and an original thinker. I highlighted many passages of writing and was delighted with the fresh thinking she puts into her characters. The protagonist of the story is Janina Duszejko who lives in a remote, mountain village in the Klodzko Valley, near the border with the Czech Republic. I’ve been to Warsaw and Krakow and much of my ancestry is from Eastern Poland so I have an interest in the region and culture. Olga is an activist and voice against the right-wing, conservative politics and aspects of Polish culture. She is a spokesperson against anti-semitism and anti-gay views, as well as supporting animal rights and feminism. The book was originally publised in 2009 in Polish and translated in 2018 into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and was adapted into the film Spoor in 2017. She has lots of fresh ideas, such as wondering why the brain cannot process all of the body’s internal processes. We need blood and urine tests, x-rays, cat scans, MRIs, etc. to figure out what is going on. Janina is regarded by most of the village as a crazy, old woman, but she has a good core of close friends that There were many passages that I highlighted below.
- “Sometimes, when a Person feels Anger, everything seems simple and obvious. Anger puts things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell; Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision, which is hard to attain in any other state.”
- “Long years of unhappiness cause a Person worse degradation than a fatal illness.”
- “It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting dusk.”
- “One thing’s for sure – these houses won’t be here; my efforts are insignificant, they’d fit on a pinhead, just like my life as well. That should never be forgotten.”
- “Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism- it ages. Just like the cells of the body…” – education suffers from group think
- “…he told me, probably quoting Luther, that he who suffers sees the back of God.” – A Catholic criticizing a Protestant
- “Children are soft and supple, open-minded and unpretentious.” – that is why it is so uplifting to interact with young people
- “On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it’s plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.” – winter mornings, cold, dark, painful, better to be in bed
- “It’s better to live with someone than alone. It’s easier to go through life together than on one’s own.”
- “I would go into the forest – I could wander around it endlessly. Here things were quieter, the forest was like a vast, deep, welcoming refuge in which one could hide. It lulled my mind.”
- “One has to tell people what to think. There’s no alternative. Otherwise someone else will do it.”
- “For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist…the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafes and houses of their past.”
- “So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air.”
- “Everything will pass. The wise Man knows this from the start, and has no regrets.”
- “every single Person has their own expression which he or she overuses. Or uses incorrectly. Generally – Apparently – Don’t you think – In truth”
- “lifetime opportunities are missed, because you overslept, because you didn’t feel like going, because you were late, because you were neglectful. It’s a tendency to be sybaritic, to live in a state of mild semiconsciousness, to fritter your life away on petty pleasures, to dislike effort and be devoid of any penchant for competition.”
- “President was pretty good at carousing, and had a wild, typically Slavic streak, dangerous for himself and others.”
- “This drifter physician reminded me that we should never make ourselves too comfortable in any particular place, in which case I had probably gone too far with my house.”
- apoptosis – programmed cell death
- foehn wind – wind falling down the leeward side of a mountain; warm and dry after dropping moisture on the way up the windward side; the name from the Alps in Switzerland; Santa Ana in southern California; chinook in the Rockies; Eastern European folklore claims it causes headaches, irritability, and unease
- reconnoiter – a military observation
- hyleg – astrology term, Persian-Arabic term for the planet with the most important position
- postprandial walk – post meal walk
This is the first book I read of the 2018 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. I will seek out her Man Booker Prize book, Flights.
