Soviet Milk by by Nora Ikstena, tr. Margita Gailitis

This Latvian autofiction from 2015 was widely acclaimed in its homeland, and its English translation was published by the London-based specialists in translated European novellas Peirene Press in March 2018. I read it at this time because it was longlisted in January 2019 for two awards, the Republic of Consciousness Prize (a UK award for small-press literature) - which has a bit of discussion on the Goodreads group I'm active in, The Mookse and the Gripes - and the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) Literature Prize.

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⭐⭐⭐½

This seems like a good novella to read if you're interested in exploring the history of the Baltic States through literature. It's about lives lived, a daughter and mother, under the final 20 years of Soviet communism, a period not covered so often in other recently translated novels I've encountered, and it's one of the too-small number of Latvian books translated to English.

But if you are already familiar with the history, and/or were alive, even in the West, to see it on the news, the book (or perhaps this English translation) over-explains the basics of events and general tendencies, and avoids some specific vocabulary; for example samizdats aren't called samizdats, but "photocopies of smuggled books". It still includes some beautiful descriptions of local scenery and everyday items, but it feels like a novel written with an eye to a mainstream foreign market, or for young people in its home region. Maybe these explanations were added in the translation, but I'd have expected Peirene Press to assume a greater level of knowledge than this in their audience - perhaps the translation was done this way to make it palatable for sale to less boutique-y publishers outside the UK.

That would be understandable, as novels about difficult mother-daughter relationships - a small subset of those also with references to milk in the title (e.g. Deborah Levy's Hot Milk) - have been a recent publishing trend. I'm not sure that Soviet Milk stands out enough from these - although perhaps the mother having a serious full-time professional job (a gynaecologist) helps it to differ from all the books about mothers who were housewives, who were unable to work, or who did not identify themselves with a career. There are, though, some experiences in Soviet Milk which don't get a lot of coverage in fiction and drama, especially being a young carer, and being in a lone parent family which has a decent income.

I didn't especially like the way that the story was presented, and from a more objective standpoint this is, frankly, petty. I'd noticed Soviet Milk described as "autofiction" shortly before I read it, and I would rather have read this story presented as a memoir, with the adult daughter's understanding and analysis sitting alongside events rather seeing things presented from the child point of view, including incidents where a lack of wider knowledge and context underlay the apparent negative feeling, e.g. Hamsters do sometimes eat their young - this was well known at my primary school. Latchkey kids were a common phenomenon in Western countries in the 1970s too, and under Russian communism from its earliest days. The lack of childcare whilst the mother worked was systemic rather than a personal failing. A child doesn't experience such things in the aggregate, yes, but these understandings are part of the process of mature, informed adult making-sense of the past. (I often asked myself, especially in the early part of the book, whether it was framed the way it was as a literary device, or because it reflected where the writer was at psychologically. If the latter, my criticism was particularly unfair.) Sometimes understandings emerged as the narrator grew up, but I had already felt frustrated and irritable too often while reading the book, and I would rather have read this material in a different narrative framework.

I usually find it contrived when characters in novels are very passionate readers and find books a means of survival - it seems like a cheap tactic designed to get a certain type of reader on side, when a lot of real people get solace in other ways: however it also makes sense in the family context, as the mother's obsession with literature probably contributed to her daughter becoming a writer; and besides literature feels more valuable when it is something genuinely difficult to obtain, as it was under Soviet Communism, than when there is a surfeit.

And, whilst it isn't an issue that affects me personally, there are some women readers who would find it a problem that the book symbolically equates breastfeeding with being a good mother.

There were a lot of moments, especially in the first two thirds of the book, when I felt the book could have done a better job of explaining why characters felt as they did. It was just assumed the reader would get things. It seemed to be on an oddly surface level for a psychological novel. About many of the situations and sentences, there were questions a counsellor would ask to probe further. I want a memoir or autofiction to answer more of those. Although this silence could also be an effect of the setting, of living under the Soviet system: one had to keep some doors closed in one's head (about Latvian independence, personal feelings or their intertwining) and the type of self-reflection now encouraged by Western psychology was not a readily available tool - so why would narratives about c.1969-89 use it? Perhaps it is also a question of the ultimate unfathomability of chronic severe depression to a person who only gets reactively depressed: regardless of whether you grok it, it simply has to be accepted that it exists and some people experience it; and a child or teenager witnessing it may not understand it that way, and also has plenty of other problems to deal with.

I wasn't totally convinced by the mother's first person narrative. The voices were too similar, especially given their differences in age in the daughter's earlier years, and, although asterisks always marked a change of narrator, I sometimes forgot and would only realise a few paragraphs in that it was now someone different telling the story, and I would skip back and re-read with that context. It didn't go into much depth in describing how the mother felt in being away from the city and not fulfilling her youthful ambitions. She was living in what, to many, could seem like an idyllic location doing useful work with lower pressure than in an urban setting (the sort of life of which great memoirs are made - being a rural doctor with a great rapport with patients in a vanished world). I had to try and extrapolate, and remember that while that sounds idyllic to me now, I'd have felt exiled too if I'd had no choice but to live in such an area much before the age of 35 (she is only about 25 at the start). But it's a psychological novel: shouldn't it be saying what that meant to her? Should the reader have to mess around with guesswork and projection? Better for it to be a memoir in which the narrator says openly that she didn't understand such and such about her mother, or she imagined her mother might have felt like____. But fiction has more of an international market than memoir, so if you are writing in a small language, autofiction is a cannier choice.

As my irritation decreased, a day or two after finishing the book, it became easier to see a few positives. The mother is presented as excellent at her job and worthy of respect for that. It is absolutely not some kind of searing indictment of her as a person. It shows without telling the paradox that her child gave her motivation to live and do useful work despite her severe depression, at the same time that she wasn't terribly good or suitable as a mother (although there are also many worse out there). In a society where motherhood was not put on a pedestal, she perhaps would have made a conscious decision not to have a kid. The mother is an example of a sort of person known in psychological literature to be especially sensitive to conditions around her, conditions which don't affect the majority that way. It's previously been difficult to provide accessible supporting links for this idea, but this recent review of a new book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, now makes it possible. In Soviet Milk there isn't any of that romanticisation or overt association between mental illness and brilliance which is common in western literature, including medical memoir, see for example Kay Redfield Jamison. (The mother's bosses are instead puzzled by their coexistence in one person.) The mother's abilities academically and in bedside manner, and the severity of her depression, are both major features of her life, but they are not seen as inevitably interdependent.

The background feelings about Communism and independence were particularly similar to those I've previously encountered in Estonian literature (e.g. Sofie Oksanen). I guess this is inevitable given the similar circumstances and location of the countries, and the shortness of this book not providing more space to explore what is distinctively Latvian. There are a couple of Latvian books I've been thinking about reading for years, High Tide by Inga Ābele, and Flesh-Coloured Dominoes by Zigmunds Skujiņš, but Soviet Milk is the first time I've actually got round to reading one. For the first experience of reading a book from a country, there was surprisingly little that felt new about it. Although it would take more than one novella to get a feel for a country's literature and its distinctiveness.

I am puzzled by the very high average rating for Soviet Milk. It strikes me as a work similar to Guguły by Wioletta Greg: a short autobiographical or semi-autobiographical book about a girl growing up in the later years of the Communist Bloc, containing both lyrical descriptions and tough experiences - one which is going to connect strongly with some readers but not be overwhelmingly special to others. Yet Greg's book has an average of 3.79. In Soviet Milk, there is more material on the psychological repressiveness and occasional benefits of the Communist regime, because the family was more directly affected, and because the writer is five years older, but this subject had been documented in many novels before. There must be something unusual about Soviet Milk within the context of Latvian literature, and which I am missing. It would be good to know more background about it.

(Read Jan 2019, reviewed Feb 2019; the review on Goodreads.)

Marta by Eliza Orzeszkowa, tr. Anna Gąsienica-Byrcyn & Stephanie Kraft

⭐⭐⭐⭐

A short feminist novel set in 1870s Warsaw, published in English translation by Ohio University Press for the first time in 2018. Marta is a young upper-middle class woman whose husband has just died, leaving her almost no money. She discovers that her perfunctory education in ladies' accomplishments has not equipped her for the limited range of jobs available to women - while working-class women of her age already have years of experience under their belts - and she struggles with increasing desperation to support herself and her small daughter.

Eliza Orzeszkowa is most famous in Poland for On the Niemen (1888), a longer, rural, novel which is on the school curriculum. (It has so far only had a self-published translation to English.) So far as I can tell, Marta is the first new professionally-published English translation of any Orzeszkowa work for decades, which is quite exciting if you want to read Polish classics in English. (There was previously The Forsaken (1980?) and The Argonauts (1901).)

Marta has been variously described as melodrama, as social realism and as naturalistic. Eliza Orzeszkowa was part of the Polish Positivist cultural movement, of realist writing influenced by Dickens, Balzac and Zola, of watchful stoicism about Poland's occupied status, and, as was was popular in much of 19th century Europe, middle-class advocacy for hard work and social and technological progress. The Positivist outlook was also a pragmatic way of staying safe whilst maintaining a public voice, especially under the more repressive Tsarist regime that ruled Warsaw and the rural area where Orzeszkowa lived for most of her adult life. (Somewhat greater latitude was possible in the Austro-Hungarian zone in the south.) As Prof. Grażyna J. Kozaczka explains in the introduction to Marta,
"The Polish intellectual elite, the intelligentsia, found Positivist ideas very attractive as they justified the rejection of military actions in favor of refocusing attention on rebuilding Polish society and ensuring that cultural connections persisted in the nation split among three separate foreign empires. Positivists set their goal on organic work that involved using only legal means to achieve the cultural and economic growth of Polish society."

Marta is based on a "there but for the grace of god go I" scenario. Some years earlier, Orzeszkowa had taken the unusual step of divorcing her husband, and her opportunities were also limited by the ruling Russian regime's restrictions on Poles who, like her, had supported the 1863 uprising. But due to her considerable language skills, she was able to support herself with translation, writing and publishing work. She was aware that similar financial independence was not possible for most of her female peers.

In the years immediately after it was written, Marta had a significant impact in Polish and other Continental European languages. The protagonist's situation was commoner in Poland than in some other countries due to "the loss of estates due to punitive confiscation or poor management in the changing economy", as Kozaczka explains in the introduction; and that it was soon translated into, among others, "Russian, German, Czech, Swedish, Dutch, and even Esperanto". Borkowska says that it "became the bible of German feminist movements".

This pan-European impact was probably enhanced because, as Kozaczka notes, the Polish setting is not strongly emphasised. Locations are mentioned, but the novel's subject is the unprepared woman struggling to stay afloat not in Warsaw in particular, but in the city in general, which "takes on a menacing quality" now she is unprotected by her husband: the late-19th century city a-bustle in the process of industrialising and commercialising.

"the great city assumed the form of a huge hive in which a multitude of human beings moved, surging with life and joining in a race. Each one had his own place for work and for rest, his own goals to reach, and his own tools to forge a way through the crowd."

"Here, as everywhere else, the degree of a worker’s well-being is in direct relation to the excellence of what he produces." [Whilst these days, at the level of work Marta is trying to obtain, consistency, presenteeism and promptness are probably more important provided there is basic competence.]

A handful of features pop out as locally distinctive. There are some attitudes and thoughts more Catholic than Protestant, although none which changes the story. The most noticeable was the preference, even in shops selling goods of feminine interest such as haberdashery, for dapper male staff - who were considered good for business because they were attractive to wealthy female customers; this is also a major feature of The Doll by Bolesław Prus (1890), the greatest Positivist classic. (These men were expected to flirt, but not *too* much.) It contrasts with the popular figure of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century shopgirl in Britain, and Zola's The Ladies' Paradise.

As someone from a professional middle-class background whose capacity for work and earning is, for health reasons, not what I once thought it would be, I expected I would feel a connection and sympathy with Marta, regardless of the story's overt didacticism and its fairly basic style of writing. I also anticipated it would be interesting as a historical document.

In a translation where one is reading both the author and the translators for the first time, and the translators are also quite new to book-length fiction, it's not easy to be sure how much of the style reflects the original. However, the small amount of commentary I've been able access in English suggests that the flaws were in Orzeszkowa's writing. "Her first works are not very well-written and may only be of interest as testimony to the author's sympathy for the trends of modernization,", says Grażyna Borkowska in Ten Centuries of Polish Literature (2004) (p. 182). Czesław Miłosz, in his History of Polish Literature (1969, rev.1983) implies that although novels were her most famous output, they were not, perhaps, her forte: "their technique is old-fashioned and perhaps not up to the level of the exceptional mind which she revealed in her correspondence with the most eminent intellectuals of Poland and Europe" (p.303). She recognised this herself, saying in one letter, "If I was born with a creative faculty, it was a mediocre one. That spark was a little enlivened by considerable intellectual capabilities, and great emotional capabilities, perhaps too much for one heart." (p.314).
Whatever one thinks of Orzeszkowa's writing, she had an interesting life and mind: perhaps a biography would be more interesting than some of her novels, and she may have been better-suited to non-fiction writing. But novels were where the opportunities lay in her day. Between the lines of Miłosz's (and others) descriptions of her, I'm seeing an intellectual writing "accessible" fiction to earn money to live off, and because it got her message across:
"the most open to new intellectual trends, and until her death in 1910 she reacted with understanding to currents which seemed to the Positivists just madness" (p.304)
"her abundant literary production could be qualified as 'populist' although the term has not been used in Polish criticism" (pp.304-305).

The simple style made it readable on occasions when I might have been too tired for more complex writing, and - though it's much long since I read Frances Hodgson Burnett to be wholly confident of similarities - I often thought of A Little Princess when I started reading Marta, not least during the scenes in her new, spartan accommodation. Although unlike a children's book, one shouldn't necessarily expect a happy ending. I always felt that likelihood that made it better and more honest. This feeling was captured by some lines in an article about burnout that went viral the weekend just before I finished writing this post: "In the movie version of this story, this man moves to an island to rediscover the good life, or figures out he loves woodworking and opens a shop. But that’s the sort of fantasy solution that makes millennial burnout so pervasive." Yes, that kind of stuff gets annoying and obscures real problems. I found myself preferring this 19th century story to many contemporary ones, because it seems truer to those who fall through safety-nets, whilst so much recent material still assumes a greater level of security than actually exists now for plenty of people, as compared with 10-20 years ago.

This was one of those novels in which the author seems to be warming up, as the writing becomes more gripping further into the story. Its trajectory follows Marta through increased levels of need, from early stages which will probably be most recognisable to other people originally from comfortable backgrounds, such as trying to refuse wages from a kind employer for work of a low standard, although she had put a lot of time into it and needs the money. It is about the process by which such principles are whittled away as she becomes better acquainted with real need and what it entails. She learns to work backbreakingly hard for a while and survive on a couple of hours' sleep a night for weeks doing two jobs. But because her skills are few, and training opportunities non-existent, there is further to fall.

As the novel's crescendo built towards the end, I found a description of a state of mind I hadn't seen written about so recognisably before - it was possibly the character's background as well as the timing. Of moments of discovering the operation of a clawing, reflex-level, almost spasmodic desperation for the means of further survival - who knew little bits of money could matter that much, not that they looked like little bits any more - in which former care about manners and propriety is sunk and unfelt; and how it feels depersonalised, dreamlike and surreal, for this is not an existence one ever expected - expectations still lodged in a subconscious quite untrained for these circumstances, built for a life in which requests would mostly be answered and sometimes not even necessary. I read much of Marta around the same time as Vernon Subutex 1 - very contemporary but also dealing with a formerly comfortable character's descent into destitution - and for a few days the two novels were a small chorus, showing a situation which is a social problem, but one not seen as so bad now, because these people have been more privileged in the past, and there will always be some decisions people will say they could have made differently (albeit more so in Vernon's case than Marta's).

Kozaczka makes a powerful argument which quotes Kelleter and Mayer from Melodrama!: The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood: “the melodramatic mode has always lent itself to stories of power struggles and to enactments of socio-cultural processes of marginalization and stratification.” There are plenty of occasions when seeing real life in melodramatic terms can be positively disadvantageous on a personal level. But extrapolating from this cultural relationship between melodrama and inequality both prompted me to re-evaluate forms and tropes that have often been derided in more recent times - and to consider that rather than being antiquated, it may be a form and tendency *increasingly* suitable for arts in the contemporary landscape of growing inequality and political polarisation, manifest climate change and mass population movements - shaking up the background complacency remaining after the stability and optimism of recent decades in most Western countries. (The news has already become more melodramatic over the past two and a half years - illustrating some of the drawbacks of melodrama as a real-life format, full of, in Kozaczka's words about the form in general, "the unambiguously drawn conflict between good and evil set on the stage of a “modern metropolis”; the effusive expressions of feelings; and the presence of stock characters who may not have deep “psychological complexity,”¹⁹ such as wealthy villains and beleaguered heroines whose virtue is constantly tested—should not to be discounted altogether.")

Despite what I thought when starting Marta - and my reservations in recommending it for anything other than historical interest - the style and the melodrama doesn't seem to have been an obstacle to other recent English readers either: several, on GR and one in this blog post by a judge for the 2019 US Best Translated Book Award, have also found the book more involving and affecting than expected - so there seems to be something about it; maybe it's not just me.

(Read Oct-Nov 2018; reviewed Jan 2019. The review on Goodreads.

Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg, tr. Eliza Marciniak

This short Polish autofiction was longlisted for the 2017 Booker International Prize, although I had wanted to read it since I first heard of it the previous year.

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Wioletta Greg's writing owes a fair bit to Bruno Schulz… but Schulz's stories are wonderful and so is this: often charming and adorable, yet with dark currents running through it. It's not quite so verbally acrobatic, but still full of enthralling descriptions of the narrator's eccentric family, and life at home and in the immediate environs. I'm guessing native readers of Polish might be more used to this sort of thing, given Schulz's centrality to literature in Poland. Olga Tokarczuk said in a recent interview [I wrote most of this post in late October or early November, just after I read the book] he "raised the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him but I also hate him because there’s no way to compete with him. He’s the genius of the Polish language."

But, as an English-language reader who has nowhere near exhausted what's available in translation from Poland, this Schulz-influenced style delightful and novel. I was already predisposed to be interested the book, being near the author's age and having heritage from the south of Poland, but the style of writing on top of that made it one of my favourite reads of the year. Any cultural references were a joy to look up, knowing they were things I'd have also heard of in childhood had I lived in, or maybe just spent more time in Poland myself; I recognised a few items as souvenirs, and I felt nervous on Wiola's behalf when she submitted an unintentionally-suspicious painting to a Communist children's art competition.

Whether this small semi-autobiographical book is a novella in sequential snapshots (I prefer to see it that way) or a short story collection, it shares something else with Schultz's first collection. Both volumes have delicious, appetising titles in Polish that reflect the almost edible quality of the cosiest and most beautiful moments of the narrative, but in English, have been retitled in a way that suggests something horrorish. Cinnamon Shops v The Street of Crocodiles; Unripe Fruit v Swallowing Mercury. I would say inexplicably, except that I'd guess English-language publishers of the 1960s thought Cinnamon Shops sounded girly or Christmassy, where they saw the market for East European literature as masculine and serious, and certainly not seasonal. I wondered what the process for this book might have been. Did someone think that Unripe Fruit was an icky title in English for a book about a pre-teen and teenage girl, even though the author chose it herself and the protagonist actively rejects unwanted incursions on her sexuality? It's a translated literary novella rather than a book likely to get the attention of the sort of Twitter mobs that pick over every choice of word by Neil Gaiman. (The title of another story, Sour Cherries would have suited the book rather well too, for its combination of appetitising-and-not, and especially its Polishness, but I guess that would have had similar implications about a young woman if the translator and/or publisher were approaching the title from that same angle. Instead, in English it has been retitled according to the most traumatic story in the book, an event by which I think it's evident that Wiola-the-protagonist would not define herself.

I needlessly put off reading Schultz for maybe 20 years, assuming the content quite different from what it was; whilst not scary, something that wasn't my idea of fun: jagged Buñuel-esque surrealism in which pedestrians were bitten by crocodiles. But it only took me about 18 months from publication to read Wioletta Greg's book, as I had read the beginning of it when it was first released and previously liked her writing in online literary journals.

And 2018 was a better time to read it: I'm not sure I'd have appreciated it as much, or in the same ways, had I read it as part of the 2017 Booker International longlist. I found it a more feminist work than many novels that are explicitly described as such. Gregorszewska takes a style of idyllic reminiscence about growing up strongly associated with male authors, and includes as brief incidents starting periods, and sexual assaults by adult acquaintances, the sort of thing which often get chapters or whole books to themselves dwelling on them with much commentary. (To me the assaults seemed bizarrely many, but the many #metoo accounts of the past year or so indicate that hers probably wasn't an unusual experience. And besides, this was a country in which girls had traditionally married earlier on average than in Western Europe and so may have been viewed as sexual earlier on by more people.) In tone the book is also similar to Cider With Rosie: broadly idyllic, but actually doesn't shy away from the darker aspects of life at the time, including poor housing conditions and human behaviour. Adolescent Wiola goes on with her life in many ways as she had as a child less subject to norms of femininity: the narrative integrates starting her periods in what I felt was a subtly very effective way: it's not a weird thing that seems to make her feel different or even think that she should feel different; she just keeps living and acting much as she pleases, and doing tomboy activities like going about the countryside collecting scrap metal for a school project. Unlike in the reminiscences of older female authors I seem to recall reading when I was younger - but whom I couldn't now specify - it never separates her from tearing about the countryside, or from a sense of her own story and not being beholden to others which historically one saw more often in narratives of growing up by respected male authors. Nor does she even have to discuss this. She just does. Likewise she gets on with other things in life despite being somewhat disturbed by the assaults (the effects are shown by actions rather than introspective writing) and she is entirely absorbed in various projects and other events. I really liked the way Wiola is obsessive about collecting, whether for herself or for school projects, in a way I could strongly relate to, but which popular culture often associates with boys and men.

There are many ways in which to the British reader, the levels of technology make it seem like the story is set decades earlier than the 1980s. (Although it is not surprising if you saw Poland just after the fall of Soviet communism, when horses and carts went about the roads in some areas routinely, whilst in the UK they'd have seemed like apparitions, or wanderers from the set of a costume drama - and dusty slum villages that were like something from a news item filmed in Romania, or outside Europe.) Kids in their early teens still have outdoor and cooking skills worthy of Arthur Ransome or Enid Blyton protagonists. However, glue-sniffing was evidently a problem common to Western and Eastern Europe back then; it was kind of strange seeing what I had thought of as a British social problem of the 1980s pop up in the midst of this half-mythic world - although it is also part of the novel's trajectory, in which modernisation gradually changes the world of Wiola's village , and she becomes less sheltered in her teens.

Unlike in a lot of Polish literature, there's no hint of racial issues being handled with attitudes any different from those in Western Europe, perhaps because Wiola's father likes to talk about his Sinti heritage, and the family was slightly disadvantaged by this under the Communist regime.

As in several of the Central/ East European novels I've read over the past few months, the grandmother is an almost folkloric being and embodiment of ancient ways. Wiola's grandmother wears seven skirts, hosts feathering evenings - where local old women pluck feathers for home-made pillows and quilts - makes traditional dishes such as buckwheat blood pudding and sour rye and potato soup, and puts a red blanket on the bed of an ailing child to draw out the fever. Meanwhile, Communist woman is encouraged to be a worker equal to men, as evinced by Wiola's mother's job making paving slabs at the start of the book.

Her grandfather, an old maker and mender of stoves, is benign and more practical and measured than the narrator's father, an amateur taxidermist and genial, ramshackle eccentric, who is the presiding spirit of the book (just as Bruno Schulz's father is in his first collection).
"He showed me a different kind of geometry of the world, where boundaries are not marked by field margins overgrown with thistles and goosefoot, by cobbled roads, fences or tracks trodden by humans, but instead by light, sound and the elements."
Conflict is usually in the background so that the narrative often retains its picturesque quality despite events:
"my father took over the running of the farm and, to my grandmother’s dismay, began to introduce reforms, gradually turning our homestead into an unruly and exuberant zoo"
and
"since his return from military detention, Dad had been living in two houses: one was a stone ruin wobbling unsteadily over its limestone foundations, while the other, which for years had been forming in his head, was a clean brick house with central heating, an attic scented with resin and a shiny bathroom tiled from floor to ceiling."
However, there is grit too when necessary:
"All that was left of the half-mile of bunting were muddy shreds soaking in the ditch next to empty vodka bottles and cigarette ends."
some of it of the sort you'll recognise if you know less glamorous side of the countryside: "the bones of a rusty harrow protruded from under a tarpaulin among young nettles."

I've rarely encountered a book which contains so much loveliness whilst also not shying away from very unpleasant aspects of life, and I am very impressed by this combination of romanticising-and-not. I was always going to have something of a soft spot for it - if it had been from almost anywhere else I might never have read it due to the English title - but my expectations were surpassed, and I'm glad to see that the sequel, the better-named Accommodations is out in English next year, even if, so far, only a US publication is evident.

(read Oct 2018, review finished Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)

Bride & Groom by Alisa Ganieva, tr. Carol Apollonio

This is the second novel from Alisa Ganieva, a Moscow-based Dagestani author in her 30s, to be translated into English by Carol Apollonio and published by Dallas-based Deep Vellum (whose cover designs I love). It was released in Russian in 2015 and in English in 2018.

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I had a great time reading Alisa Ganieva's The Mountain and the Wall around Christmas 2015, and so this December I jumped at the chance to read the second of her books to be translated to English. After reading both books, I'm impressed by her genre-hopping skill, each time firmly within a literary mode; the earlier book was dystopian speculative fiction; this is a romance. (Literary romance is not something you see a lot of these days - or maybe the plotlines of the American and British ones I see don't appeal so I don't really think of them that way, just as blah novels about twentysomethings in Brooklyn or wherever.) Both of her books share a recognisable authorial voice, and are packed with details about both modern and traditional life in Dagestan, an area rarely covered in Western English news - which is what I find so fascinating about them - and also know how to create the kind of mood and suspense associated with their respective genres. Introducing tension into the story of a couple whom the reader knows from the start will get together, and making this felt by a reader who would very rarely pick up a romance novel is, IMO, an achievement. How it would seem, though, to regular readers of romance, I can't say.

Most of the novel is set in a community where arranged marriages are the norm, while its hero and heroine Marat and Patya - young Dagestanis who work in Moscow law and have been summoned home by their respective parents for matchmaking - both have a more secular, liberal outlook than others around them, without being outright rebellious. The general process, aside from specific Dagestani customs, will presumably be familiar to people from cultures where arranged marriages are prevalent. A motif of a veiled bride impersonating another, meaning the groom did not marry his intended, also in Orhan Pamuk's A Strangeness in my Mind, occurs in an anecdote told by one relative - I am not sure how common this kind of story or legend is and what that might signify about the originality versus folkloric basis of the novel to someone who knows the culture better. From a Westernised viewpoint the book makes an interesting juxtaposition of attitudes found in novels from very different eras - a contrast the main characters' experience too in living between different worlds and finding ways to fit partly into both. There is work in the legal profession in Moscow, the struggle with discrimination (his long search for a private apartment in Moscow—his non-Russian name had scared off all the landlords) and at the end of a long train journey, there are people like Granny:
the world in which she dwelt had absolutely nothing in common with ours. In her world people still lived in mountaintop castles with flat roofs, divided up the fields and the harvest strictly according to ancient rules, and sent their sons to the villages of conquered neighbors to feast at their expense; after murders they demanded a vow of purging from forty men and exacted fines measured in units of grain, copper kettles, bulls, and sheep. These reminiscences descended into some infinite depth of the ages, and it was impossible to believe that she had ever personally been a part of that strange life
and the less picturesque hometown:
A sudden gust of wind hurled a cloud of steppe dust at us, along with shreds of cardboard boxes that looked like dry crackers, a faint, simple melody from a distant tape player, and the dreary sound of cows mooing.
(Talking of cows, their sound is once transliterated as “Um-bu-u-u-u!” - which sounds so much more like the real thing than the English 'moo'.)
some steppe village surrounded by abandoned oil towers, or a roadside motel with scorpions rustling within its pitted, sunbaked adobe walls.

I've unfortunately only read one other novel focused in a relatively positive way on arranged marriages in a Muslim country, the chick lit-style Tender Hooks aka Duty Free by Moni Mohsin, which, although it contains a lot more about political events than British chicklit would, doesn’t consider issues with the same level of seriousness as Bride and Groom. As in The Mountain and the Wall, the growth of stricter forms of Islam is a significant part of the background - there are tensions in the characters' small home town between a traditional mosque and the newer Wahhabi mosque "on the other side of the tracks" - as is political and legal corruption, both in Moscow and Dagestan. (In a discussion thread about 2018 London novel In Our Mad & Furious City it was pointed out that very few contemporary British and American novels manage to write about Muslims without any plotlines about radicalisation. While it is overdone in English-language literature, from what I can make out about the reality of Dagestan, it sounds as though, there, is far more genuinely prevalent and influential, and more appropriate to include.)

It is a patriarchal culture, but Ganieva indicates that there were also inspiring women in non-traditional roles.
the late Mashidat Zalova, our literature teacher. She had been six feet tall, an old maid, polyglot, and passionate bibliophile… As the daughter of an enemy of the people, she could not be allowed to work in city schools, but our out-of-the-way suburb was no problem. Rumor had it that she had been wooed by Adik’s widowed grandfather, an architect and veteran of the Great Patriotic War… persistent in his attempts but she had foresworn family life and closed herself in with her dusty tomes and folios.

The Mountain and the Wall indicated the change from Soviet propaganda showing women doing work equal to men's, to more recent religious-inflected pressures, but some families in Bride and Groom value the education of intelligent daughters:
We got you into the top school, hired tutors, helped with university, and set you up with an internship. Could I even have dreamed of such a life? I worked from the age of twelve!”
at the same time as pushing them towards marriage and expecting them to take on a substantial share of household chores. One mother is a senior cardiologist - this is a world in which women like her are expected to do it all, work and housework.

The characters' frequent conversations about recently-imprisoned local bigwig and fixer Khalilbek, who is connected, spider-like, to almost everyone, may in theory be repetitive, but I thought it a realistic impression of how frequently people in a small community would talk about a recent major event. (Some authors might vary the topics more for the sake of it, even if that meant less verisimilitude). The Afterword - which I wish I'd read at the beginning, rather than when I was ¾ of the way through the book - sheds light on the religious conflicts, on Khalilbek and on recurring motifs, by explaining how Ganieva incorporated Sufism into the novel. (The connection she makes between Khidr, Musa/Moses and the Green Man is intriguing but instinctively looks to me like a stretch.) She mentions that there areallusions to Sufi poetry in the text; as I don't know these works myself I can't say how well the references come through in the English translation - but it would be very interesting to read a review of Bride and Groom by someone who has a good knowledge of these texts and of similar cultures.

Unlike The Mountain and the Wall, Bride and Groom doesn't have a glossary. In a way it could do with one - although there were benefits to looking stuff up online: watching videos of the dance the Lezginka, and seeing pictures and articles about the food (there is lots of food in this book, as you might expect from a story about weddings and visits to traditional relatives) and learning more about it, for example that adjika can be considered to be to Russians what salsa is to Americans, and that the Russian equivalent word for spicy also includes flavours such as garlic and vinegar as well as chilli (which makes more sense to me than the English). There are many details that connect regardless of notes: the almost perverse lack of glamour of modern psychics and fortune tellers; the reminiscences of grandparents with a tone familiar to anyone whose family had rural roots only a couple of generations back; parents who bicker in a way familiar from old TV shows.

Ganieva is one to read especially if you enjoy using novels for armchair tourism - in this case to an intriguing area very few people visit in person, due to long-term travel warnings.


(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review on Goodreads.)

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Jennifer Croft

Winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.

A very 00s, pre-recessionary book. I daresay that's part of the reason for its recent success in the world of English-translated literary prizes. It must be a break from current political stresses for many judges and readers, evoking a liberal prelapsarian time when it never occurred to middle-class frequent travellers with an internationalist outlook that not everyone aspired to or admired their way of life - and when there weren't the grinding financial worries that would emerge for so many in the Global North shortly after its 2007 publication. A time when it didn't seem entirely silly to say: "Soon we may well say that it’s the cities that supplement the airports, as workplaces and places to sleep." In this book from over ten years ago. it is still possible to feel that, when travelling, one is off the radar, inbetween real life and real places: there isn't the always-on wifi and the expectation of being in touch 24/7. Its contemporary elements include, subtly or overtly the travel subculture and its attitudes, things like They weren’t real travellers: they left in order to return. - although unlike many of the travel culture's real-life proponents, Tokarczuk does occasionally mention the environmental impact of flying.

Many of Flights' characters evoke British political writer David Goodhart's frequently cited concept of "anywheres" versus "somewheres" (an explanation for Brexit and similar political shifts). This book is all about "anywheres":
Mostly wealthy tourists, Americans, Germans, Brits, and also those who had lost – in the free flow of money, which they let guide them – any and all defining traits. They were simply attractive, healthy, moving with unsummoned ease from language to language.
In the book's take on 'travel psychology', there are three progressive phases of psychological development in the traveller growing used to waking up away from home - starting with the assumption that one is at home, through the bewilderment at 'I don't know where I am' - to the enlightened ‘It Doesn’t Matter Where I Am,’ it makes no difference. I’m here..

I was fortunate to read Flights late in the year - not in the spring at the time of the Booker International list - and thanks to earlier GR reviewers went into it forewarned about inaccuracies, both those that are strongly contradicted by personal experience, such as the alleged absence of the over-40s from tourist hostels, and errors of factual knowledge across domains including physics, neurology and history. This meant that I always read any unfamiliar, apparently-factual material with some scepticism. I looked up things at times to check, but was not always sufficiently invested in the book to do so thoroughly. (There are stories and passages in Flights which are too much like bog-standard English-language litfic about middle-class families. As one of those readers who likes translated fiction to introduce a little strangeness to English and to fiction, and who reads it to get away from that sort of mundane contemporary British or American novel, this was not my sort of thing. [Have been trying to remember where I got that 'strangeness' from - thought it was a Tim Parks article but searching suggests not.] Although I enjoyed Flights to an extent that would merit 4 stars, the factual errors mean it gets no more than 3. Its reach is polymathic, but it stands up poorly against major 'encyclopaedic' novels that contain significantly fewer mistakes (although it's rare one of these books is found to have none, once let loose for a few years on a reading public with specialist degrees in many subjects. Paid reviewers in the press ought to have the job of thoroughly checking such material in novels they cover, but sadly this doesn't seem to be done.) It is disappointing, too, when there are readers who seek encyclopaedic novels by erudite women, not to be able to recommend this one more strongly due to the number of mistakes. If the 'factual' material were coming from a character's stream of consciousness, it could be fitting (although the errors should really be indicated in some way for the benefit of readers who wouldn't know or check) as there is a Jungian / 'woo' inflection to the book at times, and sometimes a chatty, vague style, which would sit well with half-remembered impressions of facts read years ago.

Tokarczuk has described Flights as a 'constellation novel', probably a new term in English, although the novel of fragments or volume of linked short stories is not a new form. If you enjoy noticing when apparently unrelated books you've read recently mention the same obscure fact, event or motif, you will likely get some fun out of Flights. Its ostensibly separate stories and passages - a mixture of apparently semi-autobiographical anecdotes, contemporary and historical fiction, jottings and epiphanies - are pulled together by similar minor connections. It's inevitably linear on the page (and it would be intriguing to hear how Tokarczuk decided the order for the pieces), but in ideaspace it has the shape of a 3D network diagram, with links between multiple nodes. On a small scale it is like an internet, although the web is only a minor feature in Flights. (An early internet /hypertext novel, 253 by Geoff Ryman (1998) - which I enjoyed more than most people on GR - also took the theme of travel, specifically a London Tube journey and its passengers: the loose structure and sense of movement associated with travel evidently suits these unconventional formats.)

The most apparently impressive connection made in the book is perhaps fictional: that an Italian soprano who sung at Chopin's funeral (his heart having already been removed to be taken to Poland) was also in Vienna during the 1848 revolution in which Angelo Soliman's body, stuffed for display without his consent, was destroyed. I can find nothing about 'Graziella Panini' outside references to Tokarczuk's book - though if someone reading this post has a biography of Chopin which goes into detail about his funeral, they may be able to check if she was mentioned. This string of events is connected to the book's other major theme, anatomy. It is not one I enjoy or find pleasant - but Flights did at least, unlike any other work previously, prompt me to think more rationally about why that might be, when I agree with people knowing and learning it as a topic, and also about its importance in the history of medicine - even if it is not in anatomy but in physiology where advances are still obviously required to understand medical phenomena.

There is some that tinge of exoticisation / orientalism, here of various Asian and North African settings, which is quite common in East European literature (e.g. Cărtărescu, Krasznahorkai) and less examined than it would be in British or North American literary fiction of the same vintage - part of a culture in which this is not discussed and flagged up to the same extent, and where these writers are already notably more liberal than average for their countries.

I once planned to read Tokarczuk's books in English in chronological order. And so far I've read two of them in reverse chronological order - which provided the unexpected fun of spotting motifs from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) emerging in Flights two years earlier. There is the 'invisbility' and anonymity of older women: For example, if something crazy were to happen, nobody on the scene would even remember her having been there, or if they did all they’d say would be, ‘some woman’, or ‘somebody else was over there…’; vegetarianism and environmental issues (although Tokarczuk is a member of the Polish Green Party, so these may be perennial in her books); canine [wolf] headed persons reported by early travel writers; and most copiously, an unconventional detective story.

The detective story was the main element that motivated me to keep going enthusiastically through the book; anticipating a resolution near the end (having looked at chapter titles) sustained my interest and goodwill towards the rest of the narrative. And then there wasn't one! This is actually flagged up in Flights' UK blurb, but I hadn't read it properly. It meant that, although these days, in Kunicki's shoes I probably would have let the absence go, assuming a decent store of prior trust and goodwill, I found myself empathising with his frustration and nagging, because I'd read about ¾ of the bloody book waiting for this information too. I was fed up with the narrative for the next several chapters but was eventually back on board after some apposite lines quoted near the beginning of this post.

Whilst it's necessary to have some alertness to notice the connections between stories or vignettes in Flights, most of the pieces of writing are not as intellectually dense as I'd assumed from others' reviews of the book. Some GR posters have said Drive Your Plow is an easier book than Flights, but I would say it is a similar level of difficulty, wearing its learning more lightly but with plenty to uncover for those who've read relevant material (one GR friend pointed out connections to Derrida, which I never would have noticed). Plow is more focused and tightly constructed, and better for it IMO. Flights, like the later book, has paragraphs of intense observation and philosophical musings, although here, there are more of them, and their failure / fancifulness rate is higher. Similarly, there are passages of gorgeous description in Flights - the chapter on plastic bags, described as if they were a species, is outstanding and perversely beautiful - but also some which are a little flat compared with those in the shorter novel. I still find Olga Tokarczuk very likeable: I just wish this book had had more editing, especially fact checking when it was first published. (Factual errors are generally not altered for translation, especially not in fiction.)

(Read Nov-Dec 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and discussion thread on Goodreads.)

Nothing More by Krystyna Miłobędzka, tr. Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese

Krystyna Miłobędzka is an eminent Polish poet now in her mid-80s. This short, career-spanning bilingual selection is the only book of her poetry available in English.

The two introductions were helpful in setting context - though I read the first (by translator Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese) 10 days before reading the poems, by which time it had percolated down into the idea of Miłobędzka as a minimalist poet who worked towards increasingly briefer, pared forms over the years. It was an idea I could relate to, as during a brief phase, 5-6 years ago, of feeling I could write poetry (something I've otherwise been unable to do), it was the removal of words, that seemed at least half the essence of the enterprise.

At first, Miłobędzka's poems felt too opaque / oblique, and I missed the background understanding of the poet's life I'd had when reading Wioletta Greg's Finite Formulae and Theories of Chance (also from Arc Publications and read on Scribd), via having previously read Greg's autobiographical novella. I couldn't picture who or where Miłobędzka might be writing about to the same extent.

But they also seem very intuitive poems, and I found that reading them when tired - a kind of hypnagogic insight - at a point of consciousness when I couldn't really construct full sentences myself, but readily visualised dreamlike images, produced a connection with these increasingly short poems that used only the most important words, with very little filler or explanation.

Interpreting them as poems of the domestic sphere: household, children, garden, nearby walks, made them more lucid. But sharp as the legendary Damascus steel, and with experimental skill, the form is far from that commonly associated with domestic fiction, and the honed, orderly feel is different again from the current decade's books of writing fragments and scraps focused on home life by innovative English-language female writers. It gave me the impression of a woman of extraordinary ability who had nonetheless spent much of her time as a housewife - perhaps because she found it inspirational and conducive to her writing. However a look at the Polish Wikipedia entry (via Google translate) indicates she also worked in arts venues. Whether or not the domestic subject matter is a feminist choice by author or by the editors of this selection, or simply incidental, I do not know - but this kind of experimental writing elevates it intellectually and spiritually.

It isn't indicated which poems are from which collections, or where and if they match original, uninterrupted publication order, but several are in in satisfying thematic sequences. The final one focuses on the themes of nothingness, sand, and the transience of all objects, the body and of words, only to be followed by the one-word exhortatory poem "mów! / speak!" (as if realising and concluding that one is still here and should), followed by a somewhat longer piece:

I am. Co-alive, co-active, co-guilty. Co-green, co-tree. I co-exist.
You do not know yet what it means. Gifted with diffusion. I
vanish I am. I co-endure (with You) on this glassy day (with this
glassy day into which I vanish) which vanishes with me so
lightly. I don’t know what it means. Co-open with the window,
co-flowing with the river. I am in order to know I vanish? I van-
ish in order to know I am? All of me but all of me nowhere to
be found. Co-fleeting, co-skyward. Half a century I have lived
for this!

I'd been reading Krasznahorkai, and about him, recently, and was reminded of the Buddhist / yogic aspects in his work.

As the Miłobędzka's poems often use simple words, I could understand, on the most elementary level, parts of the Polish versions of some of the smaller poems. (It would be interesting to know if the description of the poems as 'ungrammatical' means she sometimes uses non-standard noun cases in Polish; if so, extra use of the nominative might have been why I found words easier to recognise.) I was usually pleased and surprised by (as far as I could tell) the fidelity of some translations, although of course it was not always possible to replicate the rhythm of sequences of similar-sounding words. The one of the few mis-steps among these shorter poems I tried to read in original as well as English was, I felt, with jest rosnące drzewem / the is growing into a tree. Polish does not have articles, and in that example, I felt the English would have worked better without them too, letting all the lines begin with "is", not "the is", also reflecting the minimalism of the later poems. "Isness" is an idea already present in earlier in this collection, so it would be apparent to readers that it related to Miłobędzka's previous use of it. Where "the is" did work, like here (it works because of the 'of', I think):

the is of the silence in the room
the is of the walls, each so different
the is of the sunshine on the curtain
the greying is of the dust
through the thin is of the glass
the is of the sparrow outside the window
the is of the child on the grass, chasing a butterfly
the is of the butterfly in the net
the floating is of the cloud
and once again: I am
in this vast
circular spherical nobody’s
agape virulent scorching
grass-strong swift-winged quick-legged
dripping rabid
acute
is

[That is agape as in gaping, not agape, universal love - and in Polish there is an overtly mentioned grasshopper only implied in the English.]

These poems will not be to everyone's taste, and some people would find them pretentious, inaccessible etc. - although these readers aren't likely to pick up small-press translated poetry in the first place.

This is the first year I have personally, inwardly *wanted to* read more books by women (i.e. to read an equal number of books by male and female writers) rather than feeling like I was being harangued to do so by the online literary world. It is a relatively tricky goal when added to that of reading more Polish books. For example the Goodreads list Polish Books Published in English, aiming to cover all books of whatever age, currently has 20%, 45/229 female-authored books on it, and regardless of the additional translation barrier, Polish literary culture has always been more male-dominated than British. This poetry collection was one of a small number of books by Polish women authors I could access inexpensively or free.

I am very glad I ended up reading it: it soon became apparent that it was too interesting to be a 'duty' book, and it left me with a deep sense of awe or reverence, which I had certainly not expected.

It's rare I want to start a book again as soon as I've finished it, so that has to be 5 stars, doesn't it? Yet somehow I'd feel presumptuous giving this 5 stars. The mood of the book itself provoked a sense of modesty or humility (quite different from being down on oneself). And then there was the sense of complexity, and with it the worry that I might not be able to access or interpret the poems in the same way again when feeling less sharp. I can't adequately communicate what it's like to fully inhabit the felt sense and muscle memory of what it was like to ride a bike and to be trying it again and unable to do it and be about to topple because that balance component doesn't work as finely as the average person's any more, and the ability is gone, although you can feel what it was like to have it, right down to the position of that groove you used to find and hit - but like that. "Getting" poems like this (especially without extensive notes) is a mysterious and intuitive and sometimes fleeting process.

Some understandings can be explained confidently, like the "speak!" above; some is more personal and experiential, like reading "a family of tables, a family of doors" as a friendly personification of the household furniture as creatures of their own kind, familiar both to oneself and to each other (perhaps the English 'a nest of tables' helps?) as well as a way of describing how the human family in the house gathers and moves.

On a sentence-by-sentence level this is the most challenging book I've read this year (I'm glad I didn't know that before I started) although that is significantly mitigated by its brevity. These are almost koan-like poems that, where the meaning isn't immediately apparent, may benefit from being looked at for a while, letting ideas and responses emerge. When I'd finished it, I went back to the beginning again to see what else appeared in the early poems after I'd acclimatised to Miłobędzka's approach, and because the feeling brought on by reading the poems was so peaceful, one I wanted to perpetuate.

(read & reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

The Bill: For Palma Vecchio, at Venice by László Krasznahorkai, tr. George Szirtes

This Krasznahorkai short story was printed as a standalone work in a collector's limited edition volume by Sylph Editions, illustrated with a number of Palma Vecchio paintings. I read it on Scribd as a short story in the Dalkey Archive Press collection Best European Fiction 2011, and looked at some of Palma Vecchio's art online. This means I looked at it as a story instead of book-as-object.

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It is about the moment of anticipation as the best illustration of desire (though that is reductive; Krasznahorkai's long sentence explores the byways and corners of thought and feeling involved in that idea); told from the apparent viewpoint of a pimp who provides courtesans to Palma Vecchio, who uses them only as models. (The women's initial mockery and/or bewilderment about that, of the client not wanting sexual services, is something that never seems to be found in recent serious fiction or memoir about prostitution by female authors - instead there is, IIRC, relief at less work - but there is so little historically by women to compare that delves into inner thoughts in that situation to compare with modern writers' attitudes.) The narrator suggests that their figures, in the way Palma Vecchio paints them, evoke the undulations of the landscape of Bergamo where the artist grew up (this has a mocking tone to try and evade pretentiousness and tenuousness). The girls laugh at their colleagues or themselves later appearing as the Virgin Mary and other holy women. "I myself think we're all nothing but bodies" the narrator says, irreligiously.

This small book clearly has its fans: the presentation copy will be part of that, though I think this story would have worked better in a themed collection with other pieces to reflect and refract. It feels especially dense for a work of so few pages, dense in its observation of minutiae, but there is not quite enough, I think, for it to work on its own - if the point of the volume were the paintings, a compendium of most of Palma Vecchio's paintings, and the story an accompaniment to them more unusual than gallery-style labels, then it would seem weightier, if I may speculate on a book I've never seen a copy of. At any rate, what I can say after writing this post is that the style is somewhat infectious.

Historical fiction often isn't involving enough to distract me from wondering about research and evidence, but in the second half, because of the narrative's immersion in thought processes, this managed it.

(read and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads. The review has been edited slightly for clarity when I cross-posted to the blog.)

Santango by László Krasznahorkai, tr. George Szirtes

One of the monuments of contemporary world literature, awarded the 2013 Best Translated Book Award, and among the works which contributed to Krasznahorkai's win of the last (2015) body-of-work based Booker International Prize. At time of cross-posting this review to the blog, I still haven't seen the Béla Tarr film.

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The setting was half-familiar to me from reading Polish literature recently, the run-down central European village - most like the one in Andrzej Stasiuk's Tales of Galicia (1995), but ten years earlier, as Eastern Bloc Communism crumbles, (not afterwards, as everyone looks around, bewildered, asking "what now?") As if villages in Olga Tokarczuk had fallen into disrepair, or Wioletta Greg without the Cider With Rosie glow. The German names in Satantango surprised me for a minute, but of course, this was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire too, like some of those in the the old southern partition of Poland.

Everything in Satantango is decaying and, as the autumn rains start, floods with mud. With hindsight it looks like a clear metaphor for the crumbling Communist state.In 1985 did it look in real life as if things were moribund? I don't know enough about Hungarian history to be sure, though it seems not unlikely. It's clear from this old article (old enough that it says "Krasznahorkai is not a fashionable writer") that the book was a major event in intellectual circles in mid-80s Hungary. It was "anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system", and published by a strange chance.

The use of the word "estate" instead of "collective farm" in the translation initially threw me. "Estate"? I thought this was under Communism. The first sentence of the plot summary on the film's Wikipedia page reorientated me, and I referred back to this summary on a few other occasions, for a handle on what was happening, making allowances for the order of some scenes being rearranged in the adaptation. (Not a purist approach to reading, to look this up, but the introductions in Penguin Classics often give more away than using Wikipedia in lieu of footnotes.)

There's nary a post about Satantango that doesn't use the word bleak. But there's bleak and there's bleak. On the scale of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (which I read a couple of weeks earlier) and The Unwomanly Face of War (an audiobook I was in the middle of), most of Satantango is, 'yeah, shit happens'. A bunch of working class people in late middle age lose their savings to a swindler and leave their homes for new jobs with on-site accommodation - with evident parallels to communist collectivisation. But the characters are able to work. And unless the jobs and rooms are a mirage, there are plenty in this country now less fortunate. It is bleaker though, when a child with a learning disability, from a family that would have had social work involvement in a better-organised community, kills the family cat and then herself. That would be hideous stuff for the headlines here too. A local man known as the doctor - a retired academic? he doesn't seem especially medical and displays no characteristics of a Time Lord - and with habits similar to old-school programmers with autistic traits, like Michael in Microserfs, turns out not just to have been observing the villagers, but to have been the writer of most of what we've just been reading, in true 1980s metafiction style. I was hearing echoes of a less sexually voyeuristic Samson Young from Martin Amis' London Fields (1989) - or rather, something earlier that both Amis and Krasznahorkai could have read. So there's bleak and there's bleak. But the book well and truly has a damp problem; I could almost feel it catching and clogging in my lungs; if you put anything down for half a day in Satantango there would be mildew on it, and you'd get mud up to your knees just from going a few steps from the front door.

I was surprised to read somewhere that Krasznahorkai had written his student dissertation on Sándor Márai, although surprised only because I'd read one or two Goodreads reviews by readers who felt Embers was middlebrow or something of that ilk. There isn't much of Márai in English. Among the positives I had heard about Embers was its atmosphere of decay, faded glamour and cobwebbed aristocracy. It hardly seems a stretch to consider that this miasma - perhaps from Márai more generally, not just that one book - probably influenced Krasznahorkai, who, with his youthful interest in "the downstairs of society" transferred it instead to a different social stratum.

It was a relief to find this essay on three of Krasznahorkai's books, including Satantango, by a bilingual critic, which observes that this, George Szirtes' version, one of his early translations of Krasznahorkai, "blur[s] or render[s] inconsistent the distinct voices and linguistic registers" of the characters. I felt a sort of flatness and sameness to many scenes, which evoked a humdrum form of bleakness (a life of boring work and meagre means that has to be got used to, with banter and dancing as periodic escapism) - but it also meant it did not usually feel like a truly spectacular novel, simply a good one. It wasn't meant to be quite like this, then. Characters who had echoes of the larger-than-life should have been bigger, more emphatically individual than I found them to be. The depth is in the occasional paragraphs of philosophical observations; as with Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow, this is said to be one of the author's more accessible works, with a lower density of these than in their heftier books.

Where the narrative did, unquestionably, sing, was in two distinct set-piece chapters.
First, the most horrific episode, little Esti and the cat, and subsequent events. It is impossible to know for sure if it is an entirely accurate evocation of the mindset of a child like her, but it feels utterly true. Half like trying to chase down and kill mosquitoes in a bedroom before going to sleep: the declaration of battle, the dramatic arcs of the focused, sometimes frantic, sometimes exhausted endeavour, every detail of the unpredictable, protracted pursuit of the live thing and times of remorse and times of doggedness. And half like the moment within an almighty, lightheaded temper, in which the tantrum-haver realises with a sinking stomach that they've already made things this bad, very bad, and it feels as if there's no choice but to keep going, so they do, resolutely with further destruction.

The scene with the party clerks could hardly be more different: essentially a comedy sketch, as bureaucrats parse and translate into appropriate official language a report about the villagers for the secret police files - it sends up the bumbling and sinister state structures as well as the characters we've just been hearing about. There's a levity underlying it which seems to indicate these things aren't quite as much of a threat as in works from the 50s and 60s, emerging from the shadows of Stalinism. The decay of the state apparatus appears to make more humour possible, even while living conditions deteriorate.

I'd looked at Satantango a few times in August and September, feeling that I wanted to read it soon. I hadn't consciously remembered it began "One morning near the end of October", but it was just then, around the end of October when I started reading it properly. It was a few days after I finished Anna Burns' Milkman, this year's Booker winner. Previously, I had felt the tension in reading Krasznahorkai's long sentences whenever I opened Satantango. After Milkman, with its also-long sentences and lack of paragraph breaks, but easy conversational rhythm, I hardly even thought about the sentence length in Satantango except once or twice: I was acclimatised.


I was initially amazed how different it was from the only other Krasznahorkai book I'd read, Seiobo There Below (2008). But of course a gap of over 20 years, from age 30 to 50+ is going to mean some differences in a person's, a writer's outlook. Hopefully significant differences, otherwise they'd be stagnating. I was glad of this discussion which prompted me to see the "bleak" and "transcendent" worldviews of the two books (and Krasznahorkai's work generally) as the development, or two sides of, the same idea. Satantango is concerned with pointlessness and nothingness in a melancholy fashion, and with a negative view of these concepts in the European intellectual and religious tradition. It's someone still grappling with these ideas and feelings, who hasn't accepted that's how things are and shifted focus elsewhere. (His European books tend to be 'bleak'.) Seiobo seems to arrive after a process of facing-up-to and positive deployment of nothingness, and meditation on death and decay, part of a road to awakening in Buddhist and yogic traditions; the 2008 book's focus is on a sense of the sacred and beauty predominantly in art. (His Far-Eastern books are interested in the transcendent.)

Understanding this - and also reading several interviews with Krasznahorkai, and the stories in The Last Wolf/ Herman, which I liked very much - meant I started to find Krasznahorkai more intriguing as a person and a writer, that he was a a writer whose work it felt possible to connect with. I felt I could see in the difference between Satantango and Seiobo part of the shift he describes here: When I was young ... I regarded [nature] as hostility itself... Later, when I was influenced by Chinese and Japanese culture, their worldview changed my attitude completely, and I started to reckon nature as the locus of mystery and of epiphany ... And now I tend to think that the only thing that exists is nature, that nothing else is real but nature, and the reality one perceives is similarly nature itself, beyond which only void resides.
He was no longer simply a writer whom I felt I should make more effort to read, and who was vaguely interesting in a detached way. Characters in Satantango sometimes felt like archetypes or symbols more than individuals you might meet, so the underlying ideas became important in animating the narrative.

(read Oct 2018, reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

The Last Wolf / Herman by László Krasznahorkai, tr. George Szirtes & John Batki

After finishing Satantango I decided to bag another short Krasznahorkai book. I hadn't expected it to be my favourite of his works I've read.
This short volume of two stories (I can't be the only person who's had more than enough of the phrase 'slim volume', can I?) was published in English in 2016. It was longlisted for the 2017 US Best Translated Book Award. The stories are thematically similar, but separated by 23 years: 'The Last Wolf' appeared in its Hungarian original in 2009, but 'Herman' was in his first short story collection, from 1986. (Thanks to this article in Music & Literature magazine where I checked that info just now.)

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At last, a Krasznahorkai work I really connect with. Reading Sátántangó a few days ago, I realised that strength of personal connection was what would make the difference between giving his books 4 stars (as I did Sátántangó and Seiobo There Below) or 5, because I can't seem to find them as utterly singular as many of his English-language worshippers do. (I'm still not sure what they see that I don't; or if I'm arrogant - I probably sound it, because he has been placed on a pedestal as the author who is an epitome of 'difficult' and 'for those in the know', as DFW used to be c.15 years ago - or if I have simply read different things that make his themes seem more familiar, which is what it feels like.)

I loved The Last Wolf for simple thematic reasons. Because the narrator is a washed-up minor academic and writer who seems to have been offered an interesting piece of work by mistake, but he grabs it anyway, in a way I for one found wholly relatable. Because it's set in Extremadura, the only part of Spain I've ever really found fascinating. (When I did Spanish at school, I wasn't that interested in anywhere else, and I've never felt that you hear enough about Extremadura. But you wouldn't because a lot of it is a rural semi-wilderness.) And because it's fiction about the natural world and its destruction - similar to the sort that Amitav Ghosh and Richard Powers have recently exhorted readers and writers of English-language literary fiction towards, trying to mainstream ideas already established in eco-criticism. But written earlier (2009), in a different literary culture and by an author of this calibre, The Last Wolf follows its own path.

I was impressed by the narrator's being so moved, unexpectedly affected, by the demise of the last Spanish wolves - as were some other, but emphatically not all, characters. He's the sort of protagonist who, in many novels, is immersed in the insular concerns of the artist and in bad love-affairs, but here he cares about something beyond himself without its being presented as a cloying life-lesson. It was conveyed so very well that it never risked cheesiness or sentimentality (which, I am realising, Krasznahorkai, is skilled in averting). The narrator's silent annoyance with the interpreter at the height of the story - as she became so involved in the story she no longer interpreted it fully - neutered that possibility, and introduced a marvellous emotional honesty to the moment that so many other authors would have neglected or skimmed over. (A very Buddhist awareness of emotion is one of the unifying points of the 'bleak' and 'transcendent' sides of Krasznahorkai's work.) The Last Wolf is a work about form and style as much as it is about its topic, and so it could never be dismissed as either 'issue fiction' or 'style over substance'. (Setting up ideals of art is not a very good idea, and can be constraining, but I have to admit this is one of mine at the moment: not art versus politics, but both at once in the same work.)

It felt right to be reading this over Hallowe'en and the following days of the dead, and as further statistics on the extent of wildlife extinction hit the news. It would have been too heavy-handed as a deliberate choice, but I'd ended up reading it because it was mentioned in a discussion thread I'd looked at while reading Sátántangó, and I was so interested in the topic of The Last Wolf I had to look at it before I'd finished the previous book.

The complex framing - the narrator is telling much of the story of what happened in Spain to a bartender at his local in Berlin, some time (probably years) later - and the wide ranging across Europe by a depressive character reminded me at times of Sebald's Austerlitz. But the sentence, the whole story being one sentence, was of course far longer than any of Sebald's. The whole story may be one long sentence, but it does not double-back on itself (like late Henry James, or parts of Seiobo): it always moves forward, which means that it is not as complex an experience as some might assumed. Only once ever did I look back, and then only one page, to make sure of what a clause referred to. My gradual steps up in reading narrative styles over a week or so, from Anna Burns' Milkman to Sátántangó to this meant The Last Wolf didn't feel tense, as I often find works in very long sentences do. The single-sentence structure was merely a reminder that within the frame, this was a story being told all in one go; and by the end, it related the story to where the narrator was at, psychologically, at the time of telling the story. (Krasznahorkai has said that he finds short sentences artificial, whilst long ones seem to him to more accurately reflect conversation and thought.)

The frequency of German place-names in Sátántangó were a reminder that the setting was the territory of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, a larger and more mixed territory than the post-war, Communist, mostly-ethnically-Hungarian Hungary. In the firmly post-Communist Last Wolf, the narrator, free to travel as a European intellectual from an EU country, wanders former Hapsburg lands: a Hungarian on his uppers resident in Berlin, he finds himself summoned over to Spain, and then returns to Germany.

The two Herman stories were first published in 1986, a year after Sátántangó: like the novel, they have a dank rural setting, and grapple with characters' dark inner thoughts about their relationship to the world.

Part of me always reads any story about gamekeepers, poachers and their techniques through Danny the Champion of the World (by far my favourite Roald Dahl book as a kid - though no-one else's that I ever met - and one of the few books I read so often that my copy looked worn, whilst back then I could read a book twice and still leave it looking brand new). I wasn't expecting to be made to revisit it and that past self now, remembering creeping through the wood with them (how badly I wanted to do that or to be them; sometimes it was my greatest wish!), hoping bait worked, lost in the process, irrelevant in the moment which side one was on - and having to feel and see that alongside my later, more informed and harder-line opinions about the repeated introduction of an invasive species to just to kill it and generally disrupt the local ecosystem.

Herman part I, 'The Game Warden', the tale of a gamekeeper who changes sides, could have been trite in almost any other hands. I wasn't quite convinced this would be something that could have really happened then and there, or occurred to a similar real man, rather than an artist's idea - but the depth of Krasznahorkai's attention to mental processes, and especially his unsentimental relating of them at junctures where most other writers would concentrate on action or cheap crowd-pleasing emotion, elevates it to a level far above obvious poetic justice. He renders the existential and depressive and grubby into some kind of high Gothic, so that one can marvel at the way he describes it and at the baroque darkness of the atmosphere, rather than being dragged down.

Part II, 'Death of a Craft' is subtitled "contra Yukio Mishima". I haven't read any Mishima; I only know a little about him by reputation, and any parallels I draw between this story and other books here are merely free association, and have a major lacuna. A louche crowd of shaggers, army officers and women from the city, visit the small town where Herman is active (tagging along, in somewhat unlikely, but certainly decadent fashion, because one of their number is visiting her seriously ill mother, who lives in the town). I couldn't help but reflect on how contemporary kink types would (mostly) use very different, rather prosaic terminology. Here, written in Hungary in the mid 80s these people are a little exotic, tinged with the sentiments of notorious transgressive books like The Story of the Eye (although I'm sure what they were up to is actually not shocking at all by contemporary Western standards, unlike the escapades in that book). I liked the way none of their number had obvious views that might be expected from urbanites about Herman (especially enjoyed the giggling at the phrase 'noxious predators', a term frequently repeated in the earlier story), and that their view of him was related rather neutrally - although, in retrospect, it wasn't entirely convincing that none of the party would have divergent opinions about the gamekeeper-gone-wild. (And like Sátántangó and The Last Wolf, the Herman stories are full of names that are both German and Hungarian.)

This whole volume - and Herman I: 'The Game Warden', especially, makes a fantastic companion-piece to Olga Tokarczuk's recently-translated Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which I read a month ago - and which was published in its original Polish in 2009, the same year as The Last Wolf was released in Hungarian. So far as I can tell, the 1986 story collection that originally included Herman has not been translated into Polish, but it was published in German in 1988. 'The Game Warden' and Plow provide two similar critiques of hunting in cultures where it's much more accepted and normal than it is in Britain; the ultimate point of divergence between the two is to be around religion / Christianity. The sense of universal compassion which emerges near the end of 'The Game Warden', whilst couched in the language of Christianity, is syncretic and can also be taken in the context of the Buddhist values and worldviews that become explicit in Seiobo, and quite possibly other works by Krasznahorkai which I have not read or which are unavailable in English. Krasznahorkai aims for the transcendent and spiritual (Herman could be seen to have achieved a stage of enlightenment and/or to have been progressing towards it in a misguided fashion, by acting out what should have remained an inner realisation) whereas Tokarczuk's book makes a critique of the earthly Polish Catholic Church.

(Finished and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones

UK cover. Image from the website of publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Review revised March 2019, after Drive Your Plow was longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.

Celebrated and controversial Polish author Olga Tokarczuk won the Man Booker International Prize in May 2018 for Flights. Drive Your Plow, published in English that September, was the next volume of Tokarczuk's to be released in Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions. It was first published in Poland in 2009.

It's a literary crime novel, narrated by Janina Duszejko, an eccentric animal-lover in her sixties, who lives alone in a remote village near the Czech border, and it has been described as an ecological thriller with feminist themes. (She hates her name and tries to avoid using it, so I have said "the narrator" and "the protagonist" more often than I usually would in this post.)

I hadn't read any of Tokarczuk's books before autumn 2018, although I'd owned copies of Primeval and House of Day, House of Night for years before that without getting round to reading them - missing out on the hipster opportunity to say I'd read her before she was famous (famous in Britain that is).

I found this a tricky review to write. The novel's protagonist has strong negative views about Christianity. I'm active in a Goodreads discussion group where a handful of the other frequent posters are practising Christians (I'm not), and some of them didn't like Drive Your Plow. I wanted to find a way to stay true to my own views whilst also being diplomatic about religion. In the preceding weeks and months there had been heated discussions (totally unrelated to religion) about some English-language Booker listed titles, and I wanted to continue smoothing things over, not spark a new bout of partisanship over another book. Months later, after talking about it, it turns out that their dislike of the book isn't directly connected with that, as conservative Polish Catholicism is quite different from their churches. But the background reading was still worthwhile, as I'd found it interesting to read about environmental activism by various Christian groups, some of which are mentioned later in the post.

This review does not contain overt spoilers, but does hint at plot developments and twists, in order to discuss whole the novel.

Drive Your Plow has been described as one of Olga Tokarczuk's lighter novels, written between the experimental Flights and The Books of Jacob (as she said in this interview) - but it's still full of ideas.

Some things were easy to say about the book.

It has gorgeous descriptions of nature.

In this it's similar to the writing of Andrzej Stasiuk, another major contemporary Polish author who, like Olga Tokarczuk, left Warsaw to move to the Tatra mountain border regions. (Although Tokarczuk was born near the area where she now lives.) Both writers incorporate the rural landscape and the culture of the border area into their work. If you are an English-language reader with heritage in the hills of southern of Poland, you are rather spoilt for choice - it's not often that there is such an abundance of translated writing from such sparsely populated areas far from major cities.

Silesian countryside, on the poster for Agnieska Holland's 2017 film adaptation of Drive Your Plow (English title Spoor). Image from radiozet.pl.

Parts of Drive Your Plow contain intensely reflective and philosophical insights. Especially near the beginning, there's a paragraph worth highlighting and remembering on every page. These hint at why Tokarczuk's longer and more complex novel Flights won this year's International Booker, and why The Books of Jacob has been so eagerly awaited by English readers of complex fiction.

Some of the novel, especially after the early chapters, is more of a pacy literary-crime story, and less overtly philosophical. Which makes it a faster, lighter read overall than it may seem from the opening pages - however this may disappoint readers hoping for something more structurally experimental all the way through.

I'm grateful to Katia's review on Goodreads, which I read before the novel itself: it was invaluable in explaining that the narrator of Drive Your Plow is a riff on a 1990s East European trend for light, ironic novels featuring female detectives. I couldn't help but see this through the lens of the English cosy-mystery subgenre, as descended from Miss Marple - but undoubtedly there are differences in the Polish equivalent which an English reader is unaware of. (The queen of 20th century Polish crime writing, the late Joanna Chmielewska, has not been translated to English as yet.) Seeing Drive Your Plow as a satire on old-lady cosy-mysteries made me look forward to reading it - it seemed like an easy way into Tokarczuk's work, more so than Flights, which had been talked up as formidable, or the two other books of hers which I'd already owned for years, and which had become "ought to reads" at least as much as "want to reads".

And, as it turned out, I loved what Tokarczuk added to the cosy-mystery concept: twists, politics, and amplification of traits that popular culture associates with older women living alone but which it does not necessarily respect - including a 'mad cat lady' love of all animals, not just cats, (Pani Duszejko is actually a dog-owner) and a belief in superstitions and the supernatural. The narrator is not as safe and sweet as your typical cosy-mystery heroine. (There is also another feminist twist on crime fiction in general: in Drive Your Plow, the murder victims are middle-aged and older men - not the usual young women or children.)

Pani Duszejko (played by Agnieszka Mandat) at a town noticeboard. Image from theplaylist.net.

In literary fiction, making astrology prominent in a narrative can get people's backs up, as it did with Eleanor Catton's 2013 Booker Winner The Luminaries. I mean, this isn't romance or commercial women's fiction, is it? On a personal level, I find horoscopes pernicious - they can be an insidious nuisance when combined with a phase of OCD-type issues. But when they are used as complex motifs in a literary novel, I think the snobbery they provoke is excessive. (Some have described this snobbery as sexist, although perhaps it is also sexist to align astrology so strongly with women.) I doubt that heavy use of, for example, Renaissance alchemy and its symbolism, in a work of fiction would irritate the same people to the same extent. Astrology is, similarly, a system of symbols and interactions - one well known in current pop culture. It has a place in fiction just like other features of pop culture disliked by some readers of 'serious' novels. I daresay Olga Tokarczuk thought about all this - as well as hardline Polish Catholic clergy's dislike of astrology - when she decided to put it in Drive Your Plow - although she wouldn't have known that the novel would be translated to English at a time when astrology is gaining in popularity among younger people.

The narrator seemed so similar (although not, I hasten to add, in her most extreme actions) to a couple of women whose posts I'd read years ago in pet forums, that I wondered if the translator had read the same forums and taken inspiration from the writing style of these people. She shares other characteristics with them beyond narrative voice: a level of intelligence and expertise in her chosen interests which a lot of people wouldn't think a "mad cat lady" type would have; and anger and hardcore views about animal rights more usually associated with recently-converted young vegans. It turns out that a linguistic similarity, the capitalisation of certain nouns, such as Animals, was present in the original Polish novel (thank you, Goodreads Agnieszka for the info). Later in the book, extended English prose quotations from William Blake (the narrator's favourite author, of whom she makes unpublished Polish translations as a hobby) indicated that he was actually the inspiration behind her capitalisations. He was writing at a time when this capitalisation was more accepted, and not necessarily an indicator of personal eccentricity, corporate brand-speak, or of a story for children, as it is now. [Since reading Drive Your Plow, and this review, I've also read Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), in the Penguin edition that preserves the original capitalisation, and where it is used for every Noun. Blake, writing decades later, was more selective about his use of caps.]


For all its positives, I also thought the book might be shooting itself in the foot while trying to do too many clever things in one go. The plot twist seemed to undermine the novel's causes: greater respect for women like the protagonist, for environmental and animal rights activism and opposition to conservative Catholicism.

This comes to an aspect of the book that I found tricky to write about; I revised draft reviews more than once in the hope of being both true to my own views, and more diplomatic about religion. In the end, the latter became easier. I realised that whilst, historically, the Christian doctrine of man's dominion over the animals can be seen as background to the current environmental situation, the exploitation of nature is nowadays criticised by some prominent clergy. Although this varies greatly by country and denomination, in general there are practices various branches of Christianity used to support, and which they no longer condone. Sweeping judgements about the entire religion are one of the ways in which the narrator goes too far. (Although to an anticlerical Pole reading Plow when it was first published ten years ago - and anticlericalism has a long tradition in Polish intellectual life* - these views may not have sounded unfairly sweeping. Many of these ecologically-minded Christian developments happened since the book's first publication, and in other countries. Traditional Polish Catholicism was, and is, very different church from the 2000s Church of England, with its fair-trade craft fairs; Anglicanism is a denomination for which it has been no great leap to speak out about the environment.)

Drive Your Plow is ambiguous about what is heroism and what is villainy. In this it has similarities to the Channel 4 series Utopia (with its plot relating to human overpopulation). By showing a character whom most would consider to be going too far, it prompts its audience, or at any rate those who agree that there is an underlying issue, to consider where they think lines should be drawn, and what might be done in the real world. I felt that Drive Your Plow, through its ambiguous narrative tone, has potential to appeal to readers who disagree with the narrator's views on animal rights as well as those broadly sympathetic to them - although in practice I am not sure if that has been borne out.

One could say that Tokarczuk was using the novel's ambiguity to protect herself given the far greater conservatism on animal rights issues in Poland, as compared with Britain. But in Poland the novel was not received as ambiguous. It apparently led to new debate about hunting, according to an interview with Tokarczuk earlier in 2018:
Hunting has become a hot political issue in Poland since the novel was published, but at the time few were thinking about it. “Some people said that once again Tokarczuk is an old crazy woman doing weird things, but then this big discussion started on the internet about what we can do about this very patriarchal, Catholic tradition.” (Thank you to Neil's review for prompting me to look at this interview.)

The pro-hunting clerical tradition represented by the priest in Drive Your Plow remains alive and well in Poland, and was influencing political policy seven years after the book's publication, in favour of logging at the once-revered ancient Białowieża Forest:

Sections of the Catholic and Orthodox churches have played a partisan role in the debate, with a passage from Genesis - “be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it” - often used to justify increased logging.
One orthodox priest from Hajnówka, Leonid Szeszko, recently called for scientific, environmental and NGOs which opposed the logging plans to be banned.
Szyszko, who has championed the logging law, is a regular guest on the ultra-conservative Radio Maria, a Catholic radio station, and appears at conferences with a priest garbed in a forester’s green uniform.

Even if one reads with awareness of this, the prevailing attitudes detailed in the book seem old-fashioned and sometimes downright strange from a British perspective. I doubt it would be generally considered extreme or weird to make meticulous reports about infractions of hunting byelaws in the UK, even if some locals in some areas might not be receptive. And in UK cities it is pretty common to be vegetarian, like the narrator, or vegan. Fur-farming (another sub-plot in Drive Your Plow) has been illegal in Britain for about 15 years now, and was already in decline before that. It was quite eye-opening to see how differently these things were evidently regarded by the majority in Poland. The hunt chaplain's sermon seemed almost medieval.

Nor, in contemporary Britain, would the established church be considered the primary upholder of 'man's dominion over the animals', as the Polish Catholic Church is in Drive Your Plow. The CofE is both less influential, and rather different in its prevailing politics. I wrote in a draft a couple of weeks before posting this review that it was inconceivable that former Archbishop of Canterbury and "national treasure" Rowan Williams, would utter anything like Father Rustle's sermon. Then, emphasising this, in the intervening fortnight, Williams spoke out in support of Extinction Rebellion, a new protest movement calling for more government action on climate change.

It wouldn't be correct, either, to take the book's view of the Polish Catholic church as globally characteristic of Catholicism, even if conservative Catholicism is influential in some countries. (Semantically, being against nature conservation always seems a very poor use of the word 'conservative'.) Famously, there was Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical Laudato si' - a follow-up to Polish Pope John Paul II's 1990 message 'The Ecological Crisis'. There are also smaller initiatives including a number of orders of nuns making active efforts to live sustainably.

In Plow, the conservative Catholicism of Father Rustle and the hunters needs to be set against the narrator as a folkloric/pagan symbol herself. While reading the novel, I had passing thoughts of the crone aspect of the Celtic neopagan triple goddess, but this was a Polish book so it didn't seem terribly relevant, and I left it alone. But Mimi's excellent review on Goodreads points out, among other things, that Janina is a Jungian crone, and also makes a highly plausible connection with Baba Yaga. (I was kicking myself for not having thought of Baba Yaga.) Thus the narrator could also be connected tentatively with Slavic neopaganism, a small movement which tends to be more openly critical of Christianity than is contemporary Western paganism.

(Incidentally, this is the first time since veganism became a major social trend that I've encountered a novel with a narrator who might be on the wavelength of hardcore vegans - i.e. the people who post confrontationally under Guardian cookery articles about meat, or who actively campaign. Actually, have I *ever*? There is surprisingly little about vegetarianism and veganism in novels, considering how common they are among urban creative people in the global North. Anyway, it would be interesting to hear what young vegans who were into astrology thought of Drive Your Plow: the narrator is more in tune with their views than most fictional characters of her age - but is her ambiguity too discomfiting?)

In yet another (!) of her interviews for The Guardian during 2018, Olga Tokarczuk mentioned that Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet was one of her favourite books, and an influence on Drive Your Plow. I read it not long before Plow - I'd been thinking of reading The Hearing Trumpet for years, and here was a good reason. The parallels between the two books are more evident now (a month after finishing Plow) than they did in close-up, while I was reading Tokarczuk's book. Transparently, both are about older female protagonists who are not taken seriously by many of the other characters - but they are centred and respected by their respective first-person narratives. They are not the kind of unreliable narrators that seem crafted to show up and trip up the protagonists, even if it is evident that the other characters don't see them as they see themselves. Both books are somewhat ambiguous and/or potentially shooting themselves in the foot: they kind of celebrate their heroines as interesting women who don't follow societal norms and who should be listened to more, alongside indicating why many people, even sympathetic people, might disregard their views to some extent. (Tokarczuk has also used ambiguity, or rather tact and subtlety in the allusive matter of the narrator's ailments.)

But this ambiguity is also what makes these books *art* rather than merely socio-political arguments and campaigns. They don't provide the easy arguments one might like them to. As in The Hearing Trumpet, people with dementia may be imagining fascinating worlds inside their heads and they deserve to live in a friendly environment that meets their needs and to be taken seriously … but the dementia can also make it difficult to keep them anchored in the real world and to be sure what they say is real. Old ladies obsessed with animals may be intelligent people who've had interesting, repsonsible jobs, and be driven campaigners … but they might go too far (and occasionally, in more serious ways than in writing endless complaint letters in the proverbial green ink).

I was impressed by the first Olga Tokarczuk book I read - though given that Plow is one of her lighter efforts, and still contained so much, it did not make me much less daunted by the prospect of reading Flights, which had been steadily sweeping 2018's translation shortlists before it.

*e.g. Czesław Miłosz, History of Polish Literature, p.xiv, "a curious dichotomy ... a more or less permanent trait of Polish letters; namely an emotional moralism obviously nourished by a strong residue of Christian ethics has coexisted with anti-clericalism and an utter skepticism as to any dogmas (religious or political)".


(Book read Sept-Oct 2018; reviewed Nov 2018. Revised March 2019 - mostly for clarity and style, and also to add points about Polish anticlericalism and Janina as crone, which emerged from discussion in Goodreads comments. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)