56) (Urizen in Blake, or “Your Reason” as it is sometimes pronounced, is a cold, repressive force).Įach of the seventeen chapters has an epigraph by William Blake – quotes (as vaguely indicated in the Author’s Note) taken from “the Proverbs of Hell, Auguries of Innocence, The Mental Traveller and the letters of William Blake” (p. 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

Drive your plough over the bones