The Wisdom of Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk has long been known as a powerful writer and activist in her native Poland.  She was renowned for decades before winning the Man Booker Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018.

Her role as a political activist has been championed by progressives and decried by fascists.  Tokarczuk uses writing as a vehicle for delivering social and political ideas. 

Tokarczuk has a knack for writing from the perspective of a diverse range of characters.  In her 2009 mystery novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, she writes from the perspective of an aging academic living in an isolated community deep in the woods.  Tokarczuk holds up a penetrative mirror to Polish society, causing urbanites to question their increasingly distant relationship with nature. 

When describing her worldview, Tokarcuzk applies a Buddhist sensibility to perception: 

Reality is like a doughnut: everything that is good and funny and juicy is outside the center, which is just emptiness.

The Center Is Empty

Tokarczuk has dedicated her career to living what she describes in her literature.  As a progressive feminist, atheist, and vegetarian, she does not shy away from expressing her viewpoint.

While her work is grounded in politics and environmentalism, she also shows a passion for metaphysics.  The protagonist in Drive Your Plow… is an astrology buff; Tokarczuk has also written about psychic abilities and religious superstitions. 

In her world, the imaginary and the real converge. 

That’s because she knows well the power of storytelling—how to change hearts and minds through narrative.  You feel empathy for her characters even if they appear completely foreign to you. 

While reading Drive Your Plow..., I felt little in the way of kinship with an astrologer living in the Polish woods, yet still I connected with her via a shared love of animals and nature.

The novel is a cautionary tale about what happens when you abuse your environment for too long.  By the end, I felt empowered thanks to the author's convictions. 

Tokarczuk’s great strength as a writer is the sense of Flow she instills into her storytelling.  You feel swept along with the action; your sense of time and space is distorted as you visit her world. 

And, with any luck, you emerge on the other side, transformed.