I come to the second book I was sent kindly by the new press, Linden Editions. This book is from a Polish Poet. Malgorzata , is a poet and Actvist. She has written several volumes of Poetry. This was her first novel, and she won a prize for the best debut novel in Poland and was also on the list for the Nine prize, which is like the Polish Booker prize. She is well known for a piece of work in which she ran the course of a river to highlight problems with the Vistula River through her poetry. This book is set in the mountains of southern Poland, in a small village near the Beskid Mountains, as a Granddaughter has returned to help her grandparents. As her grandmother is dying, the book follows them over the course of a year.<\/p>\n
\nThe moment Grandma saw a grasshopper in the scythed wheat, he says, shed drop the work she was doing and pick it up. She\u2019d cup her hands around the insect\u2019s body to construct a sealed home for it and carry it to the boundary strip. And there she\u2019d talk to that living thing and set it down on a wild strawberry leaf, a wild garlic leaf, or some tiny yellow pimpernel leaves. And chase it away into the forest. Shoo, shed cry after the insect, anything to keep it far from the harvest blades.<\/p>\n
Then I\u2019d follow her onto the boundary strip, watchfully, as if suspecting a holy rite was happening there. Grandma herself was a saint to me. In those days I\u2019d give her all sorts of names. Like:<\/p>\n
Saint Grandma R\u00f3za talking to insects.<\/p>\n
Saint Grandma R\u00f3za the tender.<\/p>\n
Saint Grandma R\u00f3za the just.<\/p>\n
Saint Grandma R\u00f3za the compassionate.<\/p>\n
Saint Grandma R\u00f3za the merciful.<\/p>\n
Saint Grandma R\u00f3za who is.<\/p>\n
The naturual world and how her grandparents know it<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The book is told in small vignettes, some less than a page long, others a few pages long, as we see these three family members trying to make the best of it.As the Grandfather in the Male way has set himself on making a new room for his wife. His granddaughter is tending to his failing wife. As the season unfurls, the natural world around them, from the wolves to the birds, marks the coming and going of seasons. As the local slaughterhouse is a noise in the background. But then it is also threatened when a landslide is nearby. A grandfather burning his head over his wife\u2019s illness, a granddaughter trying to be the glue to them all, and the grandmother trying to live on. This is a poetic book that shows us how close we are to nature as they try to live on the farm, navigating the everyday life and death cycle of the farming world, with another death looming in the background.<\/p>\n
\nLook, the earth is hungry over there too, says Grandpa, it\u2019s been moving.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s on the veranda, leaning against the balustrade. He\u2019s<\/p>\n
smoking a Klub. And gazing ahead.<\/p>\n
Moving? Where? I ask.<\/p>\n
Over there, he says, pointing at the hill opposite.<\/p>\n
The sound of church bells rings out.<\/p>\n
It has started, look, he says.<\/p>\n
Just above the parish chairwoman\u2019s boundary strip the earth is splitting. From our veranda it looks as if the bluff has parted its lips, it looks like a wrinkling human face.<\/p>\n
This village, I think to myself, must have been founded on a large slippery boulder.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m off, says Grandpa.<\/p>\n
Grandpa knows the land so well and how it moves around him<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I am so pleased to have been sent the first two books from this publisher as they have been just amazing. Last summer and this book both capture a rural world long gone in the UK. This village setting is situated on the edge of the last genuinely wild woods in Europe, where wolves roam freely and the natural world still holds sway over those who live within it. This is a book that draws you into that world. I was reminded of the place of the world of Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead by Tokarczuk, another novel set in the Polish wilderness the bog difference is this is a novel about the countryside with out any magic realism in fact it is set in the crime realism of every day life and death the cycle of life from a young granddaughter trying to help or even hold back death the old man just burying his head around the fact his wife is dying all this set to the ebb and flow of the seasons and nature around them. Do you have a favourite rural work where nature is part of the book and the world you have read about?<\/p>\n
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