When you kill [animals], and they die in Fear and Terror – like that Boar whose body lay before me yesterday, and is still lying there, defiled, muddied and smeared with blood, reduced to carrion – you doom them to hell, and the whole world changes into hell. [p. 106]
Midwinter in a small Polish village, near the Czech border. Janina Duszejko is woken in the middle of the night by the neighbour she calls Oddball: together, they discover the corpse of another neighbour (Big Foot) who has been murdered. This is the first of several violent deaths in the village. The victims are all male, and have all hunted for sport. Could the animals be taking their revenge?
Janina is a delight, as a narrator and as a character. She is eccentric, opinionated, and well-educated; passionate about animal rights, an introvert with a few close relationships; a former bridge engineer and teacher who enjoys translating the poems of William Blake, and draws up horoscopes to better understand the world and the people in it; a practical woman who lives alone, despite ill health and old age ("I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night"). Her narrative offers insight into the ways that elderly women, especially single women, are treated, and into the strategems she's developed to exploit her situation. She is witty, fierce and principled. I felt as though I could hear her telling me the tale: I felt as though we could be friends.
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