Do I have to actually finish a book in order to review it? Doesn’t the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to slog through another page constitute a review in and of itself?

I wanted to like this book. I went into it with such high hopes. After all, Tokarczuk just won the Nobel, and this is her most-recommended book.

I found it to be a collection of random, vapid, and shallow “observations” — thoughts that anyone who has traveled at all has had a million and one times — strung together in a random mess of I-don’t-know-what.

A more eloquent Goodreads review put it thusly:

Gosh. What a load of disjointed tripe.

Not a novel. Not a book. More like the author collected all kinds of things: personal notes, FB statuses, random thoughts, more random scramblings and mixed it all together into some sort of text.

Extremely dull, disjointed ramblings on all sorts of things.

It could be read but personally I don’t find it very interesting or illuminating.

Overhyped graphomania, nothing more, nothing less.

If this is her best, I’d hate to see her worst.

It really reminds me of modern visual art. Take a jar, urinate in it, toss in a crucifix, take a picture — voila! Piss Christ. Paint a picture of the Madonna. Add some elephant dung. Voila! Art! Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary. I get it — it’s postmodernism and post-postmodernism.

It’s still just nonsense to me.