I GUESS THIS is a murder mystery...that is, some people are murdered, and we find out near the end of the novel who murdered them...fortunately, though, we the readers get a lot more than the mystery's solution to think about--to wit, we get the novel's narrator and main character, Janina Duszejko, whose voice and presence Tokarczuk conjures up with preternatural salience and clarity.
Janina--whose name it feels awkward to use, since she herself does not much care for it--has a variety of appealing traits: self-sufficiency, an appreciation of William Blake (whose Marriage of Heaven and Hell the title quotes), affinity with the natural world, and a willingness to call authority to account.
One expects Big Ideas and Grand Themes when reading a Nobel laureate. I'm not sure this novel has any big ideas, but it certainly speaks to the hope that there is some way to overturn patriarchy and its arrogance and entitlement. For 2025, that feels like plenty.
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