Olga Tokarczuk
Mystical plants from my imagination @Botan_ix
I had never heard of Olga Tokarczuk until I read an article, she had written in the New Yorker on the 8th of April 2020. It was called “A world through my window.” Her writing drew me in and unearthed my deepest insecurities.
She wrote: “We believe we are staying home, reading books and watching television, but we are readying ourselves for a battle over a new reality that we cannot even imagine, slowly coming to understand that nothing will ever be the same. The condition of mandatory quarantine, of billeting the family at home, may make us aware of things we have no desire to admit that our family depletes us, that the bonds of our marriage have long since slackened. Our children will come out of quarantine addicted to the Internet, and many of us will be aware of the senselessness and futility of circumstances in which we mechanically, by the power of inertia, remain. And what if the number of murders, suicides, and sufferers of mental illnesses grows?”
I imagined her as being a feisty woman, strong, courageous and independent. She must have written the article within the first week of lockdown, and already then, she had sensed the Zeitgeist, and sniffed out what was to come. I Googled her, immerse myself in her interviews and read literary reviews on her Man Booker Prize, and her
Nobel prize for literature that she had won. I bought her book “Drive your plough over the bones of the dead” and started reading it immediately.
lLl