I made my bookclub read this, and I was a little worried that it would be a bit too wacky and experimental for their tastes, but I needn’t have been — they mostly wanted to ask me a ton of questions about translation theory and publishing. Which may seem like a knock on the novel, but I think it really attests, first, to just how unaware most people are of the finer points (or even broader strokes) of approaches to translation, not to mention the process of producing books, and second, to the fact that this novel makes people think about this stuff! There’s an added pleasure for those familiar with Olga Tokarczuk (both with her fiction and with her reputation) and with Jennifer Croft’s biography — a delightful blurring of fiction and reality, and a meta-meta-play on author/translator relationships.
It’s also just a wickedly entertaining romp, kind of like a literati Glass Onion. Yes, it’s frenetic and ventures into the absurd, but this is really an all-or-nothing kind of novel. If it were toned down, it would fall apart. The wild velocity is what holds it together.
Kasia Reads 