Her narrative voice gives the novel an instant propulsive charm: she exists, immediately, on the page – forthright, brilliant, funny, given to capitalising words in a fashion that recalls Tristram Shandy (“I combine the Practical and the Sentimental”).
A bridge engineer turned schoolteacher, now reluctantly in retirement, she is devoted to Blake, and to studying astrological charts in order to make sense out of chaos. Janina tells us on the first page that she is “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”.
But a mere whodunit would hardly satisfy a novelist who said “just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time”, and so it is also a primer on the politics of vegetarianism, a dark feminist comedy, an existentialist fable and a paean to William Blake. It is, in effect, a murder mystery: in the bleak Polish midwinter, men in an isolated village are being murdered, and it is left to Janina Duszejko, a kind of eastern European Miss Marple, to identify the murderer. The novel is almost impossible to categorise.
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