The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 29 January 2020
by Olga Tokarczuk
Drive down any American highway and you see their flattened bodies everywhere. Squirrels, raccoons, skunks, cats, deer and dogs. Road kill. Meanwhile, we're in the forests, shooting for sport, sometimes shooting for food. We're a bloodthirsty species. Men and women pay tens of thousands of dollars to travel to Africa for the privelege of murdering endangered elephants, lions and rhinoceros. We're emboldened by the notion that animals are lesser beings, soul-less and created to serve man and man alone. Animals are adaptable. That's what evolution is all about. But human activity has changed the environment so rapidly that the animal world can't keep up. Consider the confusion an animal experiences in when its entire evolutionary instinct has become useless in the face of human intervention, alteration and destruction of its environment. Consider the global transformation we're imposing upon animals who have had no say in the matter. Some people consider such concerns to be petty and anti-human. "What," they say, "about human life? If you hate humans so much you should kill yourself." The world is full of trite arguments about our interaction with the environment. But people do care. Whether we will ever catch up to the reality of our dependence upon nature before it is too late for all of us remains to be seen.
This engrossing and slightly unhinged novel opens upon the death of Big Foot, a man so named by our narrator, Duszejko, who goes by her last name because she can't stand her first. She gives the people in her life names that match their characteristics. She is perhaps madly engaged with the animals who live in her rural neighborhood, attempting to defend them from hunters. She sees connections between life on earth and the stars through her imperfect study of astrology. And she is poetic when looking upon the winter landscape of her hamlet in southern Poland, a poetic sensibility enhanced by her study of the work of William Blake. (Duszejko translates some of his work here, which introduces an interesting back-flip challenge to the translator of this novel, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, working Polish translations back into English so that they sound like another translation of an English work.) Duszejko and her neighbor Oddball work together to respond to Big Foot's death. The oddity and sensitivity of this opening passage sets a gentle and engaging tone to the rest of the book, and, even as other characters start dying off, one is drawn into the world of our protagonist and her darkened view of humanity and how we treat the world around us. We may discover, two thirds of the way through this book, that we might not quite be reading the book we thought we were. There are suggestions of Duszejko's failures, her griefs, and her creeping ailments. She is resigned to the path chosen for her by the stars and attempts, in her small way, to make the world a better place, with little hope that she will succeed.
Yes, this is all rather dark, even bleak. But Tokarczuk (and her translator) work in that effortless manner that engages a reader almost obliquely. We become citizens of this remote hamlet in the hills near the Czech border. We become advocates for our unreliable narrator. Like her friends, we want to see her survive her trepidations. And, like all of the great books, we are engaged in a discussion of the greatest questions presented to all sentient beings, human and otherwise.
(Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature; in 2019, after controversy over at the Nobel Committee the previous year.)