RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewTokarczuk is an excellent storyteller ... She is very good at creating a \'sense of anticipation,\' although the structure of the novel requires that she keep building momentum from a standing start ... There are other costs. Marta’s gnomic insights don’t always sound that different from the narrator’s, and since she isn’t really central to any story lines of her own, she sometimes feels like a mouthpiece for a certain kind of detached wisdom ... Occasionally, the thematic links between chapters are conveniently perfect ... Yet this is not a novel undermined by whimsy or trickery. Tokarczuk is far too good a writer not to complicate her own games ... Beautifully translated ... Every dreamlike image or detail is matched by another with the weight and ordinariness of real life ... There’s no real plot, of course, and the stories don’t point in any clear direction, yet somehow the novel does achieve a kind of deepening gravity ... So many of the games Tokarczuk plays pay off.
