Primeval and Other Times

it's been almost a year (!) since i read "drive your plow over the bones of the dead", and i still remember how strange and disorienting i found it. well, apparently that was quite mild by tokarczuk's standards? i'm not even going to pretend i understood half of what transpired in this meandering tale. at the center are angels, a pot-bellied Russian coffee grinder, a woman named Cornspike, a rabbi's labyrinthine board game, a frog-infested river, multiple generations of Polish families, an almighty mushroom root, and a god born into consciousness. trust me, i don't know either!! if i were to pinpoint a central theme, i think it would be the passage of time as an inevitable means of disrupting humanity. i definitely feel like tokarczuk's worldview emerged more in this book than in "drive your plow". besides the slightly fatalistic perspective on time, there's an interesting pantheistic bent here, with material things and natural elements taking on sentience and a manifestation of "God". at the same time, the magical realism doesn't feel quite like the shinto undertones i'm so used to from japanese literature. instead of driving towards a greater understanding of beauty or ephemera, i picked up on an emphasis on the harshness and absurdity of nature, and ultimately, a time-worn deity uninvolved in the waves of life and death. basically: very weird. a little too weird for me.

Sooo I just finished this book and very shortly this is what I have to say: I understood nothing of this book. This is the third book I have read by Olga Tokarczuk. I have read Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and I completely fell in love with both. Well, if you have already read one of those two let me warn you... this is entirely different. Whatever message was in this story I completely missed it. Even so, this was easy to get through and I still really enjoyed some parts mostly due to the beautiful writing.