Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk: I knew very little about this before reading, other than that it’s set in Poland and won the Pulitzer Prize. I think that was an ideal way to go into it; I had no preconceptions about the “sort” of story it would be, and for the first third of the book I felt totally content to follow the main character through her routines without really caring if anything “happened” (I say this even though there is a death within the first five pages). Beautiful, beautiful writing. I was somewhat baffled by all of the astrology, but it didn’t detract. I’m already looking forward to rereading.
Rules for Vanishing, by Kate Alice Marshall: I’m not really the audience for this – I went into it thinking it was YA, and I think that’s accurate, though I later heard people describe it as middle-grade – but there have been a number of YA novels I’ve been compelled by as an adult. So…maybe I’m not the audience for this genre (supernatural horror). I’m not sure how much I would have liked it regardless – really, really overwritten, and not a solid enough set of rules or origin story for the horror. But again, I may be evaluating it with the wrong pen.
The Runaways, by Fatima Bhutto: Each section of this novel is split among its three main characters, each of whom is connected to Pakistan and whose paths wind together as the book moves forward. The desert scenes are incredibly evocative (perhaps all the more impressive because of the emptiness of the landscape) and effective. But I found some of the character arcs (one in particular) unconvincing, contrived in service of the plot, and the ending jarring but not necessarily illuminating.
Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, by Alison Esbach: The title is kind of misleading, and I’m not sure how much of the central plot was intended to be revealed only later in the book. It’s hard to write something entirely in the second person. I liked the main character – I thought she was hilarious – but the focus on the high school golden boy didn’t do much for me, even given the basis for it (which becomes clear maybe a quarter of the way into the book.
The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer: Though this was written 60 years ago and set in Germany rather than Poland, it reminded me tonally of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – the solo female narrators, both of whom presented themselves as “older women” though I think the protagonist in Tokarczuk’s novel is in her 60s while the unnamed narrator of The Wall is only in her 40s (I guess in 1963 that counted as older?); the missive nature of the texts; the attention and care to animals; and the sense of isolation. When my partner asked what my book was about and I told him the premise – an invisible wall appears around an Alpine region and every living thing outside of it dies, leaving one woman alone in the world with the animals inside of the boundary. “Is the wall a metaphor?” he asked, and, actually, it’s not. I’m sure you could find a way to interpret it as such, but it’s definitely more of an instigating plot device to examine solitude.
