It is a mesmerising showcase of Tokarczuk’s skills at blending a scrupulous attentiveness to the most humdrum detail of village life in rural Poland with startling forays into the realms of the uncanny ... She opts for a form of writing which draws the reader in by obsessively circling around certain themes – loss, obsession, enchantment, inconstancy – that gradually take on meaningful shapes in the reader’s consciousness ... The craft equivalent of Tokarczuk’s style is the art of the mosaic, the separate stones of beautifully executed microhistories that are carefully placed to make up larger patterns of significance ... Her trusted intermediary, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is the best accomplice Tokarczuk could have wished for in another triumph of the translator’s art.
Mercurial, mosaic-like ... Full of death, destruction and dreams ... Packed with chewy philosophical ideas and spellbinding images, but with so many descriptions of death it’s not for the faint-hearted, or anyone who isn’t already a Tokarczuk fan. It’s dense and often referred to as her most difficult work.
A constellation novel: a mosaic of stories, myths, gossip, anecdotes, philosophical reveries and even recipes ... Alongside history and memory, Tokarczuk explores identity, transformation, and the meaning of home. Her meditations range from the banal to the surreal ... The novel is a little baggy in places. I preferred the evocative snapshots of local characters to the meandering digressions ... Tokarczuk’s reflections are saturated with sensory language that conveys a vivid sense of the landscape and seasonal change — floods, meadow fires and gales.
Moments of absurdity...mix in with moments of rich emotion, all topped with a swirl of folklore-like magic. A treat for fans of Tokarczuk and literary fiction.
Through these stories, Tokarczuk captures the intersection of history, war, survival, religion, philosophy, dreams, and the land ... This reissued novel is representative of Tokarczuk’s 'constellation novels,' in which scattered fragments are beautifully tied together to form a unified whole.
Pulses with the power of dreams, visions, and symbols. There's nothing extraordinary about the region in which it's rooted, or the modest lives of the people who live there, but in the hands of Olga Tokarzcuk their stories flourish
