Tokarczuk 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.
Should not be missed ... The style can be a bit daunting initially because everything seems only tenuously related, but it’s immensely rewarding once the stars start to align and reveal bigger themes.
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.
Consider this a book to pick up and put down and pick up again, to digest over time ... Antonia Lloyd-Jones translates faithfully, and no matter the pacing, Olga Tokarczuk always brings stories that stick with you, that make you keep coming back.
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
A series of vignettes that layer and twist ... Whether it’s your initial entry into her oeuvre or a return to an author whose voice haunts you, it’s a gift to have access to this early novel.
