Reviews and Comments

This one was a pretty quick read. Definitely was drawn to it by some descriptions I saw online which sounded like it was about a bunch of tenants facing eviction when a new owner takes over a building and organizing to counter that.

while that is loosely what the book was about, it was more a collection of short stories each telling us a bit about a different tenant who was facing eviction from this building in Harlem and the organizing was pretty unimportant and marginal.

I am happy I read it but I felt like such an outsider to the experience of these mostly black proles in Harlem living in high rises that I don't feel like i have much to say that feels thoughtful or smart about the book. The book itself is smart if at times kind of making fun of things within the left like "pedagogy of the oppressed" and community organizing presenting them as pretty cringe caricatures.

This book was really awesome, I was most looking forward to this book for 2022. It did not disappoint.

being familiar with ME O'Brien's writing previously I was expecting an anti-state communist, luxury space communism environment with big trans vibes and it didn't disappoint. Probably more than half the interviews featured trans/agender/non-binary people and gender and it's practical abolition was a current throughout the book.

I also really appreciated the way they dealt with trauma, revolutions and capitalist crisis as violent and traumatic experiences and how people were living and building a new world while dealing with people broken people.

I thought it was thoughtful, choosing NYC as the setting and trying to modestly explore the global revolution but always linking it back to nyc so the project didn't get away from itself.

I had never read anything from Eman Abdelhadi before, but felt like you could really see bits of both the authors through their interviews and in the characters they are interviewing.

It's really a great book, at moments touching me and making me want to cry or laugh and taking me away to a vision of the world where the commodity form, capitalism and the state have been abolished almost the world over (sorry Australia, all the reactionaries, capitalism and fascists bunkered down there).

Left any possible spoiler content to the past paragraph. so you can stop before then.

Tokarczuk novel starts off with a loud knock on the door, a visitor, and in a hurried shuffle the discovery of a neighbours body in his home: a local hermit, poacher, and dog abuser whom our protagonist has a distinct dislike of. From there a interesting murder mystery unfolds exploring the relationships between a small community bordering the Czech Republic in Poland and the human and animal relations.

Our protagonist from the begin presents as an unreliable narrator, an elderly vegetarian woman with poor social skills, a strange naming convention for people in her life, an almost fanatical devotion to Astrology, and a passion for William Blakes Poetry which the novel derives its title from. I found myself both sympathetic to her and at odds with her stories, as we see the world through her eyes, with her perceptions and biases disjointing our perception of what is happening in this little community.

Presented as a subtle backdrop to the narrative is that our protagonist has lived through Polish communism and the influence of the Soviet Union which through shreds of details such as workers hostiles and land management practices you witness snippets of a world and context which has known more than one form of authoritarian governance.

In contrast to the ruminants of soviet economic and social planning, the small towns Catholicism plays as an element that grates against our protagonist and her friends as they explore and inquire into the murders that the novel centers around. the push/pull of religious conservatism and rural madwoman left me siding with our protagonist but also left confused by how she has skewed my perception of all of the events of the book.

All in all, I found the book a short, good read (200 pgs.) which kept me engrossed from it's disjointed world building through this womans lens, murder, inquiry, and a central theme of the ethics of human relations with animals. Definitely pick it up if you're looking for something to reboot your desire to read a book and you aren't sure where to start again.

SPOILER*******

Truly this was a really engaging read, which by it's conclusion reminded me vividly but with the loosest ties of the John Wick films due to the nature of seeking out to revenge for the death of dogs companions. I would recommend it, short and smart.