She lives on a plateau, with harsh weather, and pointedly, calls it “the world of Urizen” (p.
She lives full time in a country setting in rural Poland bordering on the Czech Republic (as Olga Tokarczuk herself does). Tokarczuk’s protagonist Janina is an elderly woman who has a passion for horoscopes a skill that comes into play when her neighbors turn up dead. Not to give anything away, but the quote has a lot of relevance to the plot of the novel, as it turns out.
Tokarczuk speculated, “Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner … because English is the language that’s spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication” (quoted in Armitstead).Īs anyone who has read Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and remembers “The Proverbs of Hell” will recognize, the title of Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel is a quote from William Blake – or technically a paraphrase, as the actual quote is “Drive your cart and plow over the bones of the dead.” Tokarczuk’s novel Flights won the Man Booker Prize in 2018
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