Hacker News Reader

Comment by cafard | Hacker News Reader

Our neighborhood book club read Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and I was not impressed.

I read part of this - if I remember correctly it was reviewed in the Economist, and anyway they used to have lots of good recommendations for translated fiction. I couldn't get into it either, but I think it's the kind of book you need to read a lot of before it becomes interesting. I may try again just because this has jogged my memory.

In the afterward of "The Name of the Rose", Umberto Eco talks about how he wanted to filter for a certain kind of reader with whom the story would resonate, and does so by making the first hundred pages very difficult to read. Overall, the book is worth it in that case (although he might be joking). So sometimes its worth trying to press onward, even when the material is not enjoyable immediately.

Huh. I didn't find the first hundred pages of The Name of the Roes notably boring or difficult or anything. I do think literature generally selects against readers who aren't prepared for it. Like how it's hard to get into a new genre of music, especially the first time you start trying to branch out in that way. Don't understand its idioms, its musical language, and haven't trained your ear for it, et c. Like trying to go from a childhood of listening to only radio top-40s to appreciating classical music or jazz or something. It's jarring and off-putting at first, and may even seem silly or bad.

Towards the end of his life Stanisław Lem was asked about Tokarczuk (the recent Polish Nobel prize winner) and said the following:

"Tokarczuk offended my rationality to such an extent that I wanted to write a polemic, but I decided that it wasn't worth it, because it would mean I have to read her entire book."

Funny how famous writers often seem to be each other’s harshest critics. Was this in reference to any particular book of hers? I read Drive Your Plow and it seemed like fairly standard mystery noir fiction, certainly nothing to write a polemic about

He said that about a non-fiction book by her, an essay about a school reading realist Polish novel from XIX century. In Poland, being a good fiction writer is correlated with being a good literary critic as much as in any other country.

DYPOtBotD on the other hand is pretty much a whodunit, as such there is a certain threshold to impress book club readers, I guess

Flights is a great piece of writing though. Definitely not for the Lem crowd, but I guess there are weirdos like myself who like both.

Hunting in Poland is not like in the USA, where it is an outdoor activity generally accepted by most of population. Many if not most people would want to totally outlaw it. When you ask them if they are aware about boar damages to crops or do they think if the hunted meat is less cruel than farmed meat, they are totally unaware in how horrible conditions some of farmed animals are raised.

Regarding boars hunters are currently somewhat counter-productive, given that they are known to feed the animals.

And breed them.

They also don't follow necessary sanitation guidelines, necessary due to African Swine Fever rampaging through Poland - which results in hunts increasing danger of ASF instead of reducing it.

As someone who lived for years with year-long problems with boars.

Hunters do jack shit about them. When we had concrete overpopulation problems, it wasn't hunters who dealt with it, it was organized by forest management officials as dedicated culling action, methodical and directed.

The reason people are annoyed by "hunters" is that they are out of control, often drunk on the hunt, create danger to other people (lots and lots of cases with people killed by hunters, including causing danger in build up communities), and if you try to stop them, expect to be intimidated with guns and to see your pets shot.

Then you have hunting lobby in current govt get itself legal right to organize hunt on your land without you allowing it (and again, try to stop the mafia...)

So, yeah, zero sympathy for hunting as it is done now.

I'll inform the news media immediately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com