I usually don't like translated works. I don't trust the translation and I'm always second guessing the word choices. I doubt I'd have read [a:Olga Tokarczuk|296560|Olga Tokarczuk|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1588949514p2/296560.jpg]'s [b:Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead|42983724|Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead|Olga Tokarczuk|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547225640l/42983724.SY75.jpg|8099373] if it wasn't one of my library's monthly selections.
It has changed my mind about translations. You feel you're getting the author's voice.
Reading it made me feel like I was entering another world, that of it's narrator, an eccentric, aging Polish woman who loves astrology and animals.
After I read it, I looked at the many blurbs on the inner pages of the trade paperback edition. The blurb from the Guardian was one of the more absurd things I've read in decades: "One of the funniest books of the year."
I'd actually described it to friends as a comedy as a joke. It's anything but funny. It's dark as hell, but very good.

I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism—it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components, the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means "the dropping of petals." The world has dropped its petals.