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.)

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.)

The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Sarah Booker

This recently-translated Mexican novella from 2002 was first published in English in 2017 by Feminist Press in the USA, and then in Britain in 2018 by And Other Stories, as part of their Year of Publishing Women (a response to Kamila Shamsie's 2015 'provocation' about inequality in literary fiction). The US edition was longlisted for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.

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Slippery, literary psychological horror. It addresses current topics: the revival of neglected female authors, and gender boundaries, but was first published in Mexico in 2002.

Some readers will pick up a hint from the introductory Note from the Author, but I'd recommend reading the translator's note first: it explains some important points, and it makes the narrative and its symbolism somewhat less opaque. I read it just under halfway through. Up till that point, merely looking up the writer Amparo Dávila (thank you to other reviews for indicating the character was named after a real person), and assuming that references to 'disappearance' related to political arrests in Latin American countries had left me frustrated. The disappearance is actually that of women authors and Dávila in particular - and the possibility of expression readers are robbed of at the same time - layered with the widespread murders of women in Mexico which would also become the subject of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. The title is a reference to the bones which most easily distinguish a female skeleton from male. Another character, Juan Escutia, is also named after a real person.

Understanding this background meant that I could enjoy the book to an extent from an analytical viewpoint, although the genre and atmosphere isn't one I like much in book form. (I wouldn't have read this novella if I weren't working through a few books eligible for next year's Booker International.) I noticed echoes of Hitchcock films combined with the paranoia engendered by living in a dictatorship - as in some other Latin American, or Eastern Bloc literature and film - but many English-language readers have compared it with David Lynch. I didn't feel a Lynchian atmosphere, but the possibility that facets of the story are not amenable to clear and specific interpretations, and are instead simply eerie and dreamlike and things-in-themselves is very Lynchian. I still craved concrete interpretations of certain points (e.g. the symbolism of the character of the Seducer, and some of the last reactions of the False Amparo when the narrator says he is going to visit True Amparo) but I have not been able to find any so far in other reviews online. If it were a type of book I enjoyed in itself, and wanted to spend more time with, I would probably have spent longer trying to think of my own.

I was impressed by the skill of the translator in dealing with gender ambiguity in the narrative. The Spanish shows some other characters addressing the narrator - who often asserts his own maleness and masculinity - using feminine word forms, which English does not have, a significant linguistic drawback. Frequently, the narrator did not feel convincingly male: like a character an inexperienced woman writer had created by attaching a number of stereotypical chauvinist male behaviours and ideas to a stream of other inner thoughts that (in a way I couldn't quite pinpoint) sounded more likely to be from a woman. He sometimes described and analysed his own actions in ways that sounded a lot like women analysing a man; I thought a few times of the question "Is this a reverse?" (i.e. someone posting a dilemma in a forum as if they were one of the other people involved). Of course one cannot trust such impressions absolutely (and these days gender-based assumptions about narrative styles are discouraged), ergo ambiguity.

I thought that the three characters' talking to the narrator as if he were female could be seen as their assertion of equality: his with them and theirs with him. (He felt this habit to be an affront.) They were making the male female, as opposed to claiming male/masculine characteristics and words for themselves because of male as the default culturally and linguistically, and being more powerful (as they are perhaps implying he has been doing, and as women have done to get ahead in male-dominated spheres. This could be related to the late 20th-century shift from forms of feminism about women being or becoming more like men, to feminism about asserting femaleness in itself - although that may have been a very Global North current, of limited relevance to conditions in Mexico).

[A typo or error that stood out: a doctor, of all people, wouldn't be getting cellulite and cellulitis mixed up.]

As Dávila wrote psychological horror, The Iliac Crest presumably contains references to her stories (which I have not read), and to other Mexican literature I don't know. A couple of journal/blog reviews mention Julio Cortázar.

The ideal reader for this book probably enjoys psychological horror blended with highly literary writing, has a keen eye for feminist interpretations and theory, and a good knowledge of Latin American, in particular Mexican, literature. That isn't me.

The Iliac Crest reminds me, in its claustrophobic twisty-turny atmosphere, of some other books that were listed for the Booker International and its predecessor the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (and which I didn't always want to read in full); I wouldn't be surprised if it were on the longlist next March.

Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faïza Guène, tr. Sarah Adams

aka Just Like Tomorrow. This novella about a Paris-based teenager of Moroccan heritage is taught in schools (as another Goodreads reviewer notes, it's a French A-Level text in England), and could be seen as gritty YA. But unusually - perhaps uniquely - for a YA book, it was longlisted, back in 2007, for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the precursor to the current format of the Booker International.
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[3.5] In translation, it's a very easy read, though for someone recently finished French GCSE (the exam for 16 year olds which is followed by A-level), the slang will take some getting used to. Subject-wise, it technically has that realist 'worthiness' characteristic of the IFFP - it's narrated by an impoverished French-Moroccan teenage girl living on a tough estate on the outskirts of Paris - but it's not in the least dry, so 'worthy' wasn't an adjective that occurred to me while I was reading. This book didn't exist when I was doing A-levels, but Kiffe Kiffe plus an older classic would be a better choice than two of the latter, and certainly gives a less rarefied, and more modern view of France than the likes of Marcel Pagnol.

It's also potentially educational in that there's a lot to look up about French pop culture of the late 90s and early 00s, the sort of casual references you might get IRL: e.g. saying someone looks like a certain daytime TV presenter. (The book makes sense without knowing all these references, but I enjoy finding out this sort of stuff. If you like to look things up as you go, it means that this otherwise very straightforward book might not be the most convenient read for public transport.)

Narrator Doria's voice may grate for some readers (and the ending is perhaps a bit too neat in that YA way). I have never understood why so many older child and teenage narrators pepper their stories with "I wish [really bad thing] would happen to [so and so]". I don't remember thinking this about more than one or two people (and it's not like I was having a great time socially or at home), and I can't ever remember other kids saying it. In books I've read in adulthood, I've usually thought of it as lazy shorthand for a more inchoate childish and youthful dissatisfaction, but as Faïza Guène wrote this when she was still a teenager herself, and she grew up on an estate like Doria's, where many people have far greater material hardship than most of my old classmates, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt in the way that I wouldn't to a well-meaning middle-class 45 year old trying to write the same character.

Some contemporary readers may feel that a certain plot point needs more exploration and discussion, especially for teen readers: when Doria decides she fancies a boy who, a few weeks / months earlier kissed her without her consent, and whom she had previously found quite repellent - and it's clearly presented as a good thing by the end of the book. It struck me how this wouldn't have seemed anything remarkable in fiction, or a magazine anecdote, 20 or even 10 years ago - although by then a similar reaction to being 'ravished' would have been considered off, and bad writing, by many. One could now consider it as a reaction shaped by Doria's dysfunctional family background - which must have been pretty bad as the family had a social worker (although perhaps France allocates them when things are less bad than UK threshholds) - or a lingering subconscious effect of the patriarchal culture she is in many other ways managing to shake off. It's also an example of a popular trope of the 90s and 00s, the nerd gets the girl. But to make it just about the character neglects changing general norms - which have possibly changed more among the young and among Anglo-American liberals than elsewhere. And I find it very interesting as an example of inner emotions changing rapidly - seeing in action the stuff covered by the scholarly field of the history of emotions I referred to the other day in reviewing Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home. It was sad to see how often Doria referred to commercial women's magazines as ways she and others learned about life and relationships (and to shape their views of what was and was not appropriate to feel and do) but also sadly accurate for pre-www girls who had negligible useful support from people they knew. I was kind of glad magazines have waned, but on the consumerism and fashion front, they seemed quite benign compared with what you hear about Instagram and teens now.

I found Kiffe Kiffe really interesting. Contemporary fiction about immigrants, and about poorer people (who aren't struggling creatives) in other European countries is something I've long wanted to read more of, but not much is translated. (And when it is, it's rarely as approachable as this.)

(read and reviewed August 2018, the review on Goodreads.)

Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai, tr. Ottilie Mulzet

This is an old review from 2014 (pasted to this blog in Feb 2019) and as with a lot of my old writing, there are bits of it that make me cringe now. But as I've posted my three other Krasznahorkai reviews on here (all from 2018), I thought I may as well add this one too. At the time, I'd been active on the old-format, now-defunct Mookse and the Gripes forum for about a year and a half. Seiobo There Below had won the 2014 BTBA and was talked about, there and elsewhere, as a particularly difficult yet rewarding book. I hadn't felt up to reading something like this at the time of the prize, but decided to have a go that December.

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A tad overhyped, this (in some quarters). It's an interesting and unusual book, of interlocking short stories about art, beauty and the sacred. I'm not saying emperor's new clothes - but some of the superlatives...

- Unique, like nothing else. [Collective gist.]
A non-exhaustive list of things I was reminded of whilst reading Seiobo There Below: documentaries about art & building restoration; documentaries about and visits to buddhist monasteries; meditation and writing and talks on; How to Be Both by Ali Smith; Revenge by Yoko Ogawa; history lessons; the puzzles in Georges Perec books; the number/chapter games in The Luminaries; experiences of arriving somewhere ill-prepared, or feeling irritable whilst in queues; other long-sentence writers, especially in the German tradition. (All those 'as it were's were very familiar.)

- an impossibly wide range of knowledge
Seiobo is undoubtedly a knowledge and terminology-heavy book. However, nearly all of that knowledge is from two domains.
a) Mainstream European [art] history of the medieval & early modern period: a repetitive surfeit of Ital Ren; the Alhambra; Andrei Rublev. (Also, a reasonable knowledge of the bible is necessary for studying that period. Anyway, I wonder if this stuff seems more exotic to Americans, for whom it isn't so standard in curricula and holiday destinations.)
b) Traditional Japanese culture. Not a few enthusiasts of that around, and not an unusual overlapping interest with art history.
This is depth more than breadth: it's possible to see one person checking all this from a handful textbooks if he didn't know it already off the top of his head - it's not the vastly disparate facts that Pynchon employs researchers to verify; different from the scale of Perec who mentions stuff from many domains, giving a sense of how much general knowledge there is in a whole other culture; having been the sort of kid who read encyclopaedias for fun in Britain did little more than scratch the surface.
Part of the point is, of course, comparison with the likes of Perec - not with most other literary fiction published in 2014.


For a book I'd heard spoken of for the fascinating, intoxicating properties hidden beneath this plain cover*, it got a touch monotonous at times. Did we really need that many C15th-C16th artists' workshops? And such a lot of obvious destinations in the European sections, Italy, Spain, Greece: bloody Cook's Tour. (The Romanian lake and the land sculpture of the horse, though, was exactly the kind of strange and wonder I'd come here for.) Most main characters are men who are in late middle age and/or Hungarian. Surely the fabled Krasznahorkai does better than writing self-inserts? Among the most memorable lead characters were those who differed noticeably from the template, especially the Dostoevskyan working class Hungarian (still a Hungarian) stranded in Barcelona by an employment scam, and the embarrassed young Japanese chap trying to cope with his Euro friend's frequent faux pas at 'The Rebuilding of the Ise Shrine'.

Seiobo There Below had become a barometer or test to me since I first looked at it in March. I had a specific block on, or a very high threshold for, processing the run-on sentences of the first chapter. A couple of pages and my mind felt like a failing printer with 30 items backing up in the queue; soon jammed, it ground to a halt completely. And this wasn’t just at the worst times when I might expect that: even whilst I was up to enjoying Blinding: The Left Wing by Mircea Cărtărescu or The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth – books of comparable difficulty in the eyes of many - I couldn’t properly process this. But I kept looking at the sample (I must have read chapter 1 about ten times by now). On a couple of occasions, the text started to flow and so I got a copy, having become determined to conquer this thing at some hoped-for suitable time.

I’d now say that the first chapter, along with the first page each of chapters 377 (13) and 2584 (17 - they have Fibonacci numbers), is considerably more dense structurally than the rest of the book. (My head finds abstract sentences more challenging to deal with than specialist terminology.) Through the early chapters, I was aware of a slight physical tension produced by the multi-page sentences. Sometimes it suited the content very well (e.g. the harried, overheated tourist ‘Up on the Acropolis’). At others, whilst I understood their use as creating a sense of long-term unity for scenes that develop slowly, such as during ‘The Preservation of a Buddha’, this tension didn’t always seem appropriate to the subject, and I thought Krasznahorkai could perhaps have written some scenes in shorter sentences and others long to fit rhythm and mood of actions taking place**. Throughout the book, sentences, though extremely long, almost never had the sort of complexity I’d been apprehensive about. They don’t go back to an earlier point after a three page anecdote , rarely even a three-line one. It all flows along like a stream. (And sometimes the camera pans to a scene of another stream that’s a tributary of the same river.) Simply there are, for page after page, commas and conjunctions where full stop, space, capital letter would normally be found. A portion of the tension came from chopping up these sentences and editing in the conventional punctuation in my head – making a conscious decision about the ‘pause to take breath’ that Gertrude Stein acknowledged was part of the purpose of the punctuation she rejected on paper. Regardless, it was always hypnotic: more than with most books, it was easy to fall into it for pages and pages and not look up - I even remained engrossed at times when I had to use a book stand, not something I like. At some point, into the second day of reading, I stopped noticing: it wasn’t a problem any more, I wasn’t tense and I didn’t need to repunctuate consciously. I was just reading. It’s not Finnegan’s Wake.

A lot of this post so far has been about blowing raspberries at Krasznahorkai, or rather his reputation - but there are many, many wonderful things in Seiobo There Below. This is a work which, unusually, understands deeply meditative and reverent states, and great darkness and black comedy. Several chapters end with a sudden sting in the tail - most of these made me laugh; and I loved the way that they could turn a scene on its head without diminishing its earlier meaning. And whilst he does deal with some hackneyed subjects (who needs another postcard from the Alhambra or Florence for instance?... Especially at this distance, in a book, not in the place, I was sometimes like Brancoveanu, the sceptical colleague of the Venus de Milo worshipping Louvre security guard character, the one who feels the sculpture is trite) Krasznahorkai does bring a sprinkling of extra magic to these locations, conjured from detailed information that's less often heard, and from the meditation-like state of the prose which is intended to mirror both the transcendent experience of viewing great art on one hand, and the taut rope of sustained concentration, and the near-impossible perfectionism (which would be denigrated in many other scenarios) needed to produce it.

I wrote detailed summaries of all chapters(in the status updates below). But personal favourite pieces were:
- 'Kamo-Hunter' - a heron hunting, a beautiful creature yet predatory, nature and its cycles living alongside the bustle and buses of Kyoto, a city where the book returns several times. (Seiobo appears to follow the same classical Japanese tradition as Ogawa's Revenge, stories which are in some respects separate but which contain motifs and themes shared, though not according to a mechanical sequence.)
- 'Up On the Acropolis' - Just simple identification, this kind of journey, the eager adventure, the draining effort, having forgotten something vital. How often have I had this? (Though not, of course, the last few lines.)
- 'Something is Burning Outside' - at an artists' workshop in the Romanian countryside, no-one seems very productive. An impoverished-looking old man arrives, who turns out to be nationally famous artist Ion Grigorescu. Early one morning two other artists go out for a walk and find him and his project. [Grigorescu is real and I found this page for a Tate exhibition that included him. Watching its video led me to another artist's photographs of Armenia juxtaposing beautiful snow scenes and decaying concrete tower blocks of stunning yet brutal design.]
- 'Private Passion'. A scene which would have been quite different, laughable probably, in the medium of film or radio. An old architect, of repulsive appearance and grating voice, delivers an adult education lecture to a few bored, numbed Swiss villagers. He is, at best, a buffoon - worse, experienced by his audience as a Job-like test. His crazy passion for the music of the Baroque has a Byronic intensity which comes through on the page, making it possible to hear how differently it might have been received from a person who was attractive and charismatic, and to consider the idea of a personality trapped inside an exterior shell that doesn't match. (Or did Krasznahorkai just write this text too well for this character?)
- 'Screaming Beneath the Earth' - I don't really agree with the extent of darkness which things, life and death are viewed in this final chapter (c.f. some people find looking at the stars and thinking how insignficant we are to be depressing, I find it comforting). But the archaeological vision in this piece was exhilarating, of all these past creatures under the ground.
- In general, I've become more interested in Shinto, and the unique way in which an ancient animist / pagan religion remains part of every day life in a highly developed country. (Amazing to imagine if we still had continuous traditions like this.) It's thanks, I'm guessing, to Japan's long isolation from monotheisms, and the economic strength and stability that allowed it to forge ahead for itself without subjection to significant outside influences.

There is great stuff in Seiobo There Below, but it doesn't have the magic for me that it does for many other readers; it wasn't a transcendent experience, though it was meditative. I daresay a few others in time will find the characters a little samey. Nonetheless, there's be an ineffable something I just don't get, as with my similar underwhelmed-but-not-disliking reaction to another of the Best Translated Book Longlist, Stig Saetterbakken's Through the Night. I'd still rate a few of those longlisted books higher than this one, and, contrary to almost every opinion I've read, think the Cărtărescu better for its unusual fusion of biological science and surrealism and narrative - art in literature has been done often enough (and there's been a lot of it about in 2014 publications). I wasn't quite in the mood for these topics and places right now - the Mediterranean, Japan - they feel more summery: I wanted the dark and brooding of central European traditon, which likely would have been better served by Satantango rather than Krasznahorkai's sunlight-dappled, meditation-infused, voyage away from home.


* The chest on the cover, as well as being an obvious metaphor for looking into, opening up etc, refers to a trousseau-chest from the school of Botticelli that features in chapter 2. Its outline and the title lettering are made of a rainbow-shimmery stuff most familiar from kids' stationery. So up close, not entirely as plain as it looks.

** There's a pretty good discussion about Krasznahorkai's sentences in this interview and the comments. Shame that, despite the mention of his 'broken English', that people sharp enough to kno)w better then take his phrase 'loss of a culture of poverty' at face value rather than considering consumerism and folk culture.


(read and reviewed December 2014; the review - and dozens of quotes and status updates - on Goodreads