(czytane po Polsku ale opinia pisana po angielsku)
Read in Polish, reviewing in English. This was the first book I read in Polish in close to 15 years,(czytane po Polsku ale opinia pisana po angielsku)
Read in Polish, reviewing in English. This was the first book I read in Polish in close to 15 years, and I cannot overstate how challenging that was. While it got easier as the book went on, I'm sure that that coloured my experience of it.
I'm a fan of "no plot just vibes" books, and this one hit the mark. The language choices were beautiful and I was awed by the haphazard descriptions of snowy fields by a forest, illegal border crossings, the night sky... This entire book felt like a meditation on our smallness and interconnectedness and inspired the same feeling of awe one gets when looking at the ocean or the night sky. It was also seeped in sorrow about powerlessness and the search of agency, with vignettes about teenage girls in small towns, young women traveling abroad, and refugees scrambling through an inhospitable forest towards a better life.
As a side note, this boom is what I expected from Olga Tokarczuk's Flights (Bieguni), a book I ended up DNFing. I'll try to find a Polish copy. I'd also like to return to Dom Oriona in a few years, as I continue reading in my native language - I have a feeling that I'll like this book even more when I'm older.
It feels weird to recommend this, as I'm not even sure if an English translation exists or is easily findable, and most of you don't speak Polish. But it's a great book it you're looking to lose yourself in sorrowful, meditative nostalgia. 3.75 stars on SG rounded up to 4 on GR....more
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