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7. Woe, woe is me!

Gloom and gold. (On the Saint Emerentia icon) (p124)

To be a man means learning to ignite whatever causes trouble. That’s the whole mystery.

The horrible sight of the dark red, almost broken blood congealing on the stump forced him with painful ambivalence — to feel afraid, while also feeling a strange indescribable fascination close to pleasure, far mightier than picking scans off his knees, or teasing an already wobbly milk tooth. (p116)

…the bleeding, feathery shred tired to the edge of the stove filled him with despair and induced doleful, helpless weeping, which he was obliged to hide from his father, his uncle and even Józef. They would have said he was whining like a woman.

What was happening inside him seemed far more intense than the world’s most dramatic political events.

3. Pieraccio Tedaldi
Gevolgd door een (terecht) pleidooi voor het light verse, waar het begeleidend gedicht zelf overigens weinig mee van doen heeft.

02. Frederik II
Gevolgd door een essay over de Duitse keizer. het hier vertaalde, misselijk makend brave sonnet van deze cynische machtspoliticus is van een ten hemel schreiende huichelachtigheid.

00. Voorwoord
01. Giacomo Da Lentini
Aangevuld met essay over oorsprong en wezen van de sonnet. Droogkomisch én interessant.

6. The patients

…it was hard to rid oneself of the impression that Lukas despised others. This contempt was like s skeleton; without it he might have collapsed and dissolved like a melting snowman. But inspire of that, Wojnicz thought he seemed weak, as if made of flimsy material that looked good from the outside but would not last.

Attaboy Wojnicz!

5. Holes in the ground
…it feels as if they are standing on a stage, as if this is the overture to an opera, and the spectators in this theater are the trees, blueberry bushes, moss-coated stones and some fluid, ill-defined presence that is moving like streams of warmer air among the mighty trunks, boughs and branches.

lucius’s adventures were like dreadful torment because the threat of never managing to return to his own shape was always hanging over him, the threat that he would die as a donkey, and that his real nature, his internal existence, would never be recognized!

The outer and inner existence, with one of them being interchangeable deserves full attention here…

Empusa has already been named a few pages before (p87), and now the issue of shapeshifting passes by in a casual memory of Mieczys’s. Also, he blends Thilo with his childhood friend Tolek, in a non-erotic parallel with Pribislav Hippe and Clawdia Chauchat.

Woman is like […] an evolutionary laggard. While Mann had gone on ahead and acquired new capabilities, woman had stayed in her old place and does not develop. That it’s why a woman it’s often socially handicapped […] and must always be reliant on a man>. (p80)

Agreed upon by sickly men who are out of place and time.

Their black fingers held sloppily rolled cigarettes in dirty pallets, and their eyes shone out of their charred faces. I

mpossible for me to assume Tokarczuk is visually quoting David Lynch ‘s woodsman in Twin Peaks (Gotta light?). Which might mean that I may have finally found a connection between Mann & Lynch, whom I both obsess about

” Landscape…is a great…mystery…because in fact…it takes shape…in the eyes…of the beholder,” he struggled to say.

[Thilo] added that it was a sort of projection of the spectator’s inner state, and that we should wonder whether what we are seeing might look entirely different in reality.

Two separate quotes on page (75) that come eerily close to two separate experiences of mine.

Sticky mud full of bark, pine cones and twigs spilled around heaps of smoldering logs, as if the skin of the forest had been ripped off, leaving the wound inflamed.

4. Chest and throat complaints

Where the Empusa is implicitely pointed out (first as a praying mantis and later in the description of the two, possibly three old crones. And return as the narrator (I assume) at the end of the chapter, seeing the grander scheme of the universe, unlike the inhabitants. Wojnicz is maybe singled out as he, in his anxieties, is closer to the truth than any of the others…

…the other was so ugly as to be fascinating. Her dripping lip made her look like an ancient sculpture depicting some sort of creature from Hades.

That’s quite specific, isn’t it. What creature could that be?

3. Pheasant distance

all these matters absorbed his mind, drawing the world inside, into the larger, chaotic space that each of us carries within like an invisible piece of luggage that we drag after us all our lives, without knowing why. Our true self.

O, so now it’s us? The narrator(s) and the reader alike?

No one believes in their own death.

…putting themselves in order after the anarchic reign of illness.

2. Schwärmerei

Opitz’s wife has committed suicide and Wojnicz finds her body on the dinner table. Later that day, a first acquaintance with the other guests. Peculiar lot. And the narrator(s) still observe from the oddest corners. How strange it may seem, it’s their story…

1. The guesthouse for gentlemen

Fascinating from the get-go. To notice the similarities and, more emphatically, the differences with Mann’s Zauberberg is a treat. Most significant possible the difference between Mann’s benevolent and ironic tone in majestis pluralis and Tokarczuk’s ‘we’, who like aliens, eerily and distantly observe Wojnicz.

From travelers’ accounts it emerged that there were places and regions where tuberculosis did not feature: the higher mountains in all climatic zones, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and the steppes of Kirghizia.

That can’t be a coincidence and has to be a reference to Madame Chauchat und ihre Kirgisenaugen. For recovery. She might have stayed home…

Wilhelm Opitz raises his finger (Wojnicz is realizing what an essential part of Wilhelm that finger is. (p6)

22. Family life. Poulson searching for a deserter and Thomas going to give himself in, with less confidence in a happy end than he appears to.

21. Back in drag to get out of Fort Laramie where one ‘s looking for Startling Carlton’s murderer. And then Winona and Thomas travel back to Tennessee, by coach, by train, by boat on the Mississippi River. And then still some walking left to do to John Cole. I just hope he’s still around, because it has been awfully still and I think I remember from before, he his end is due before the book is finished…

20. Brutalities. shocking chapter. Winona saved but no mercy for Major Neal (or Sterling Carlton), who is now beyond redemption.

Winona the only soul not thrown on the bonefire. She seen the worst and seen it before. It makes her silent, so silent the silence of winter is like a clattering.