![]() ![]() Tokarczuk’s other novels display this eclectic tendency, but they don’t go quite as far. ![]() There are extensive digressions on the tripartite nature of God, the merits of Latin prose, and the ecology of the Dniester River. She toggles between perspectives every chapter, or even mid-chapter, and toggles between registers even more often than that. ![]() Tokarczuk is baggy, profuse, and unembarrassed about being either. It reads like something Hilary Mantel might produce if you trapped her in a Polish cave, or the book Helen DeWitt might write if she lost a bet. It’s easy to understand why someone might want to try a dunk tank, but there are many moments here when one wants to come up for air and dry off. It’s an ambitious premise, and the resulting narrative lacks the emotional handholds that help such lessons land. The novel is a kind of metaphysical dunk tank, a means to immerse the reader in the unusual and obscure-it tries to evoke a new awareness of how much in our contemporary world is historically contingent. She intends her multiethnic Europe to undermine the self-perception of the present-day continent, a collective of nation states where many people view themselves as separate from the poorer and browner remainder of the world. ![]() This world is low-lit and chaotic, ruled jointly by the unnatural and the supernatural.ĭefamiliarization is Tokarczuk’s stock-in-trade, and here it serves a political purpose. ![]()
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