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WORK TITLE: Flights
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1/29/1962
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Polish
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no 96009452
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no96009452
HEADING: Tokarczuk, Olga, 1962-
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PERSONAL
Born January 29, 1962, in Sulechów, Poland; married; children: one son.
EDUCATION:Attended University of Warsaw, 1980-1985.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, essayist, poet, and screenwriter. Ruta publishing company, manager. Worked formerly as a psychologist.
AWARDS:Koscielski Foundation Prize, Primeval and Other Times, 1996; Nike Award, Flights, 2008; Silver Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis; 2010; Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2012; Vilenica Prize, 2013; Nike Award, Kulturhuset International Literary Prize; The Books of Jacob, 2015; German-Polish International Bridge Prize, 2015; Man Booker International Prize, Flights, 2018.
POLITICS: Supporter of The Greens party.WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Olga Tokarczuk is a writer, essayist, poet, screenwriter, and trained psychologist. As the most widely translated Polish female author, her works have been translated into twenty-nine languages. Tokarczuk was born in Sulechów, Poland, and began writing poetry in her teenaged years. Her parents were teachers, and her childhood home was filled with books. At eighteen, she began college at the University of Warsaw to study psychology, where she took a particular interest in the work of Carl Jung. After graduating as a psychologist, she moved to Wrocław and then to Wałbrzych, where she practiced therapy for four years.
Tokarczuk began publishing in 1989, with her debut collection of poems, Cities in Mirrors. Tokarczuk has since published prolifically and explored a variety of mediums. Throughout her career she has won numerous awards, both for her literary merit as well as her peacemaking efforts. Most notably, she won the prestigious Nike Award for her book The Books of Jacob, the Man Booker International Prize and the Nike Award for her book Flights, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012. Tokarczuk lives in rural Lower Silesia, where she manages the publishing company she founded, Ruta.
Primeval and Other Times
Primeval and Other Times, considered by some to be Tokarczuk’s best work, was her first commercial success, and earned her Poland’s Koscielski Foundation Prize. The novel is formatted as a series of separate but connected stories, each opening with “The Time of.” Narration, time, and generations shift throughout the novel, with characters and places disappearing in one section, only to return in another story.
The book centers on three generations living in a made up Polish town, Primeval, during the period of 1914 until 1980.The landscape of Primeval resembles that of Poland, with roads, forests, farms, rivers and lakes. Yet there are otherworldly elements of magic, superstition, and spirituality that permeate the town. Alongside the human characters are four archangels, whose job is to step in when humans fall short. The characters in Primeval and Other Times are particularly moved by signs and symbols, using them to find meaning in their lives. “The forces of chaos, obliteration, and meaninglessness resound in Tokarczuk’s prose; as does simple, destabilizing irony,” noted Tara Bray Smith in Words Without Borders website, while Whitney Scott in Booklist penned, “focal shifts build an engrossing, multifaceted mosaic.”
House of Day, House of Night
Similar to Primeval and Other Times, House of Day, House of Night does not follow a traditional novel structure. The book details the life, people, and culture of a fictional Polish village through short narratives, vignettes, biographies of saints, recipes, and observations. The village, Nowa Ruda, is in Silesia, is a region in south-west Poland. It was split between the Czech Republic and Germany until WWII, when it became a part of Poland. This fractured history plays a role in the story, influencing the inhabitants’ sense of identity, place, and future. Lacking a conventional plot, the book instead paints a portrait of a town and its people.
Philip Marsden in Guardian described it as, “wonderfully inventive and by turns comic, tragic and wise.” A contributor to the Northwestern University Press website wrote: “Richly imagined, weaving anecdote with recipes and gossip, Tokarczuk’s novel is an epic of a small place.”
The Books of Jacob
Winner of both the 2015 Nike Award and the Kulturhuset International Literary Prize, The Books of Jacob depicts a unique moment in Polish history, in which a notable population of East European Jews converted to Christianity. The book’s sprawling 900 pages focus on the enigmatic leader of this movement, Jakub Lejbowicz Frank, a Jew who claims to be the next Messiah. The year is 1752, and the story takes place in the region of Podolia. The landscape is beautiful and pure, but the state is dismal. Podolia is afflicted by poverty and suffering; illness and filth fill the streets. Looking for a way out of their despair, the people find hope in Jakub Lejbowicz Frank’s charisma and message. A claim of being the Messiah is heresy in Judaism, so Frank creates a new religion, later known as Frankism. He is depicted by Tokarczuk as mystical, wise, and strategic. His followers are expected to reject the word of Moses and the Talmud and instead find their direction in Kabbalah. Further, they believe in the Trinity and Virgin Mary. Frankism followers’ final test of faith is conversion to Catholicism.
Tokarczuk documents the history of the movement within the region, as well as its repercussions nationally and today. She describes the book as her most ‘pro-social’ project, in which her focus is the people for the people’s sake. Aleksandra Lipczak in Culture.pl wrote: “The search for answers to great questions … intertwine with poetic descriptions of the details of everyday life.” A contributor to Cosmopolitan Review website penned, “[Tokarczuk] spins unusual harmonies between narration, dialogue and reflection, composing her novel like a piece of music.”
Flights
Flights, winner of the Man Booker International Prize, was described by a contributor to Publishers Weekly as “an indisputable masterpiece of ‘controlled psychosis.'” The book opens in modern day Croatia, where Kunicki, a tourist on vacation with his family, waits impatiently for his wife and son to return from a walk. When they fail to show up, Kunicki frantically searches the foreign land for his family. The story then jumps to a doctor’s trip to the seaside home of a career rival, and then to the tragic story of a Nigerian man whose body was mummified by Francis I for public display.
The novel proceeds in this fragmented fashion; a character is introduced, and then pulled away to make room for the next profile. The describing these characters narrator is reliable and consistent. Though some of the stories reflect her life, childhood, and views about the world, the majority arise from her interactions with the people she meets on her various journeys. Recurring themes include physical movement, the human body, and the definition of home. “Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness,” wrote Kapka Kassabova in the Guardian Online.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Antioch Review, Summer, 2015 , John Taylor, “Homelands, Adopted Homelands: Four New Polish Poets at our Door,” p. 570.
Booklist, April 15, 2010, Whitney Scott, review of Primeval and Other Times, p. 29.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of Flights.
Publishers Weekly, September 6, 2010, review of Best European Fiction 2011, p. 23; June 4, 2018, review of Flights, p. 30.
ONLINE
Cosmopolitan Review, http://cosmopolitanreview.com/ (January 31, 2016), Malgorzata Dzieduszycka-Ziemilska, review of The Books of Jacob.
Culture.pl, https://culture.pl/ (November 1, 2014), Aleksandra Lipczak, review of The Books of Jacob.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (October 20, 2002), Philip Marsden, review of House of Day, House of Night; (June 3, 2017), Kapka Kassabova, review of Flights.
Kinna Reads, https://kinnareads.com/ (May 18, 2010), review of House of Day, House of Night.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (April 11, 2018), Eileen Battersby, review of Flights.
Northwestern University Press website, http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/ (August 2003), review of House of Day, House of Night.
Tarpaulin Sky Press website, https://tarpaulinsky.com/ (September 19, 2018), Katie Eberhart, review of Primeval and Other Times.
Words Without Borders, https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/ (May 1, 2010), Tara Bray Smith, review of Primeval and Other Times.
Olga Tokarczuk
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Olga Tokarczuk
MJK32706 Olga Tokarczuk (Pokot, Berlinale 2017).jpg
Olga Tokarczuk, Berlinale 2017
Born 29 January 1962 (age 56)
Sulechów, Poland
Nationality Polish
Occupation Writer, essayist, poet, screenwriter, psychologist
Notable work Flights
Awards Nike Award (2008, 2015)
Vilenica Prize (2013)
Brückepreis (2015)
The Man Booker International Prize (2018)
Olga Tokarczuk ([tɔˈkart͡ʂuk]; born 29 January 1962) is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual[1] who has been described as one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful authors of her generation.[2][3] In 2018, she won the Man Booker International Prize for her novel Flights (translated by Jennifer Croft), becoming the first Polish writer to do so.[1]
Tokarczuk is particularly noted for the mythical tone of her writing. She trained as a psychologist at the University of Warsaw and published a collection of poems, several novels, as well as other books with shorter prose works. Flights won the Nike Award, Poland's top literary prize, in 2008. She attended the 2010 Edinburgh Book Festival to discuss her book Primeval and Other Times and other work. With her novel Księgi jakubowe (The Books of Jacob), Tokarczuk won the Nike Award again in 2015. In the same year, Tokarczuk received the German-Polish International Bridge Prize, a recognition extended to persons especially accomplished in the promotion of peace, democratic development and mutual understanding among the people and nations of Europe.[4][5][6]
Contents
1 Background
2 Published work
3 International Bridge Prize
4 Controversy
5 Books
6 See also
7 References
8 External links
Background
Tokarczuk was born in Sulechów near Zielona Góra, Poland. Before starting her literary career, from 1980 she trained as a psychologist at the University of Warsaw. During her studies, she volunteered in an asylum for adolescents with behavioural problems.[7] After her graduation in 1985, she moved first to Wrocław and later to Wałbrzych, where she began practising as a therapist. Tokarczuk considers herself a disciple of Carl Jung and cites his psychology as an inspiration for her literary work. Since 1998, Tokarczuk has lived in a small village near Nowa Ruda, from where she also manages her private publishing company Ruta. She is a member of the political party The Greens, and has leftist convictions.[8]
Published work
Olga Tokarczuk, Kraków, Poland, 2005
Tokarczuk's first book was published in 1989, a collection of poems entitled Miasta w lustrach ("Cities in Mirrors").[7] Her debut novel, Podróż ludzi księgi ("The Journey of the Book-People"), a parable on two lovers' quest for the "secret of the Book" (a metaphor for the meaning of life) set in 17th century France, was published in 1993.
The follow-up novel E. E. (1996) took its title from the initials of its protagonist, a young woman named Erna Eltzner, who grows up in a bourgeois German-Polish family in Breslau (the German city that was to become the Polish Wrocław after World War II) in the 1920s, who develops psychic abilities.
Tokarczuk's third novel Prawiek i inne czasy ("Primeval and Other Times") was published in 1996 and became highly successful. It is set in the fictitious village of Prawiek (Primeval) at the very heart of Poland, which is populated by some eccentric, archetypical characters. The village is guarded by four archangels, from whose perspective the novel chronicles the lives of Prawiek's inhabitants over a period of eight decades, beginning in 1914. Prawiek... was translated into many languages (published in English in Antonia Lloyd-Jones' translation by Twisted Spoon Press in 2009) and established Tokarczuk's international reputation as one of the most important representatives of Polish literature in her generation.
After Prawiek..., Tokarczuk's work began drifting away from the novel genre towards shorter prose texts and essays. Her next book Szafa ("The Wardrobe", 1997) was a collection of three novella-type stories. Dom dzienny, dom nocny ("House of Day, House of Night", 1998), although nominally a novel, is rather a patchwork of loosely connected disparate stories, sketches, and essays about life past and present in the author's adopted home since that year, a village in Krajanów in the Sudetes near the Polish-Czech border. Even though arguably Tokarczuk's most "difficult", at least for those unfamiliar with Central European history, it was her first book to be published in English.
House of Day, House of Night was followed by a collection of short stories – Gra na wielu bębenkach ("Playing on Many Drums", 2001) – as well as a non-fiction essay Lalka i perła ("The Doll and the Pearl", 2000), on the subject of Bolesław Prus' classic novel The Doll. She also published a volume with three modern Christmas tales, together with her fellow writers Jerzy Pilch and Andrzej Stasiuk (Opowieści wigilijne, 2000).
Ostatnie historie ("The Last Stories") of 2004 is an exploration of death from the perspectives of three generations, while the novel Anna in the Catacombs (2006) was a contribution to the Canongate Myth Series by Polish publisher Znak. Tokarczuk's book Bieguni ("Flights") returns to the patchwork approach of essay and fiction, the major theme of which is modern day nomads. It won both the reader prize and the jury prize of the 2008 Nike Award.
In 2009 the novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead was published. It is written in the convention of a detective story with the main character telling the story from her point of view. Janina Duszejko, an old woman, eccentric in her perception of other humans through astrology, relates a series of deaths in a rural area near Kłodzko, Poland. She explains the deaths as caused by wild animals in vengeance on hunters.
Tokarczuk is the laureate of numerous literary awards both in and outside Poland. Besides the Nike Award, the most important Polish literary accolade, she won the audience award several times, Prawiek i inne czasy being the award's first recipient ever. In 2010, she received the Silver Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis.[9] In 2013 Tokarczuk was awarded the Vilenica Prize.
In 2014 Tokarczuk published an epic novel Księgi jakubowe ("The Books of Jacob" in Jennifer Croft's provisional translation). The book earned her another Nike Award. Its historical setting is 18th century Poland and eastern-central Europe and it deals with an important episode in Jewish history. In regard to the historical and ideological divides of Polish literature, the book has been characterized as anti-Sienkiewicz. It was soon acclaimed by critics and readers alike, but its reception has been hostile in some Polish nationalistic circles and Olga Tokarczuk became a target of an internet hate and harassment campaign.[10][11]
In 2017, her novel Prowadź swój płóg przez kości umarłych ("Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead") was the basis of the crime film Spoor directed by Agnieszka Holland, which won the Alfred Bauer Prize (Silver Bear) at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival.[12] Tokarczuk also won the Kulturhuset International Literary Prize in Stockholm for her 2015 work The Books of Jacob, which has been translated into Swedish.[13]
International Bridge Prize
Olga Tokarczuk at the Góra Literatury Festival in Nowa Ruda, 2017
Olga Tokarczuk is the recipient of the 2015 Brückepreis, the 20th edition of the award granted by the "Europa-City Zgorzelec/Görlitz". The prize is a joint undertaking of the German and Polish border twin cities aimed at advancing mutual, regional and European peace, understanding and cooperation among people of different nationalities, cultures and viewpoints. Particularly appreciated by the jury was Tokarczuk's creation of literary bridges connecting people, generations and cultures, especially residents of the border territories of Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic, who have had often different existential and historical experiences. Also stressed was Tokarczuk's "rediscovery" and elucidation of the complex multinational and multicultural past of the Lower Silesia region, an area of great political conflicts. Attending the award ceremony in Görlitz, Tokarczuk was impressed by the positive and pragmatic attitude demonstrated by the mayor of the German town in regard to the current refugee and migrant crisis, which she contrasted with the ideological uproar surrounding the issue in Poland.[6][14][15][16][17]
Controversy
Tokarczuk was attacked by the Nowa Ruda Patriots association, who demanded that the town's council revoke the writer's honorary citizenship of Nowa Ruda because, as the association claimed, she had tarnished the good name of the Polish nation. The association's postulate was supported by Senator Waldemar Bonkowski of the Law and Justice Party, according to whom Tokarczuk's literary output and public statements are in "absolute contradiction to the assumptions of the Polish historical politics". Tokarczuk asserted that she is the true patriot, not the people and groups who harass her, and whose xenophobic and racist attitudes and actions are harmful to Poland and to Poland's image abroad.[16][18][19]
Olga Tokarczuk
29.01.1962
#language & literature
Author: Culture.plShare8
Writer and essayist, born in Sulechów in 1962. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, and winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.
Tokarczuk is one of the most critically acclaimed and most translated Polish writers, with House of Day, House of Night and Primeval and Other Tales being her greatest commercial and critical successes. She studied psychology at the University of Warsaw and lives in Wałbrzych. An outstanding writer, essayist and a devotee of Jung, she is an authority on philosophy and arcane knowledge. Undeniably a great discovery in Polish literature in the nineties, she is admired by both critics and readers. She is a phenomenon of popularity respected for her good taste, knowledge, literary talent, philosophical depth and the knack for storytelling. Tokarczuk, about herself, 'To me writing novels is telling fairy tales to oneself, moved to maturity'.
Tokarczuk has won many awards, including the Polish Publishers' Association and Kościelski Awards, the readers' choice of the Nike Award four times and was many times nominated for the Nike Literary Award. In 2002 Tokarczuk and her German translator Esther Kinsky received the Brücke-Berlin prize for literature in translation for the 1998 novel titled Day House and Night House. The prize recognizes significant contemporary literary works from Central and Eastern Europe and their translations into German. Her short story The Ugliest Woman in the World was included in the Best European Fiction 2011 anthology, an annual anthology of stories from across Europe, published by Dalkey Archive Press. The haunting story is about a man who marries and has kids with an unbecoming woman. She is also recipient of the prestigious Usedomer Literaturpreis 2012 for her literary output. The jury of the award honoured her especially for the literary and intellectual restitution of Lower Silesia in the European historical experience and in the Polish language.
Having tried her hand at poetry as a teenager, Tokarczuk then went silent for many years to make a come back with Podróż ludzi Księgi (Journey of the People of the Book, editor's translation) in 1993, a novel which was very well received by critics. A kind of modern parable, it talks about a failed expedition for the mysterious Book and of the great love which develops between the main two characters. The plot is set in seventeenth-century France and Spain, yet it is not the local touch but the fascination with Mystery that is essential.
Tokarczuk's next novel, E.E, published two years later, takes us to a more recent past, its plot set in early twentieth-century Wrocław. The main character, Erna Eltzner, hence E.E., a girl growing up in a Polish-German burgher family, is found to possess the gift of the medium. Once again Tokarczuk reveals her fascination for mysteries which are out of reach of the human mind.
Her third novel, Primeval and Other Times (1996), is still widely considered her greatest and most resonant success and a top achievement in recent Polish mythographical prose. A mythical village called Prawiek said to be located in the very centre of Poland is an archetypal microcosm in which all the joys and sorrows known to mankind converge. Jerzy Sosnowski, a literary critic, wrote about the book, 'Using fragments of real history, Tokarczuk builds a myth, that is a perfectly ordered history in which all events, be they tragic or evil, are justified'.
Primeval and Other Times recounts the hard passage of an imaginary village through a century of conflict, distant coups and decay. Centre-stage, however, are the village's colourful characters: an aristocrat who withdraws from life to play a rabbi's fantastical board game promising answers to life's great questions; a dog-loving madwoman pursued by the moon; a Soviet soldier who seeks sexual relief among forest beasts; a priest who wishes to tame a frog-infested river. Overlooking all is a vain selfish God who has become thoroughly bored with mankind and who must play second fiddle in Ms Tokarczuk's pantheistic world to material things: a sprawling mushroom root which links all matter together or a wooden coffee-grinder with which a young girl mills out time. - The Economist
Tokarczuk's next novel, House of Day, House of Night, written in 1998 and shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2004, is different both in genre and tone, and in fact it is misleading to call it a 'novel'. A hybrid of diverse and more or less advanced plots, quasi-essay observations, private notes and the like, it is Tokarczuk's most personal and 'local' book, drawing inspiration from the area where she lives (a village in Sudety on the Polish and Czech border), such as in the stunning story of the medieval Saint Kummernis, a woman whom God saved from an unwanted marriage by giving her a male face.
Although 1997 saw the publication of Tokarczuk's little collection of three short stories, it was not until Gra na wielu bębenkach / Playing Many Drums that readers had a chance to admire her talent as a writer of shorter works. The book came out in 2001 and consisted of nineteen short stories divided into three cycles. The first one, numbering a few short stories, merits the term 'self-analytical', for Tokarczuk addresses the phenomenon of literary and non-literary creation. The second cycle is apocryphal; like Tokarczuk's fascinating story of Kummernis, which was based on a true story which she had uncovered in provincial Lower Silesia, so four of the short stories featured in this volume have similar roots. Tokarczuk - in her very own way - develops the 'follow ups', embellishes and breathes life into naked historical facts. The third, large group of stories offer realistic or, strictly speaking, psychological and incidental observations.
In 2000 Tokarczuk published Lalka i Perła (The Doll and the Pearl) an essay which proposed a new reading of Bolesław Prus's late nineteenth-century novel Lalka considered a masterpiece of Polish literature.
Tokarczuk's 2004 book Ostatnie historie (Latest stories), is another collection of short stories. Short forms are evidently becoming her favourite genre, so much so that has even proposed a story-telling festival.
After 2004 she published two books, Anna w grobowcach świata (Anna in the Catacombs) in 2006 and Bieguni (Flights) in 2007. The latter was nominated for the Angelus Central European Literary Award as well as has been honoured with the 2008 Nike Literary Award. In 2018, Jennifer Croft's translation of Flights won the Man Booker International Prize, the most important literary award for international fiction in Britain.
Markedly different from her other books, Anna w grobowcach świata was written within the framework of the international Myths series which has authors (such as, for instance, Margaret Atwood or, prospectively, Jacek Dukaj) retell myths. Tokarczuk chose to retell the myth of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of harvest and war who goes to her sister, the goddess of the underworld and death and unexpectedly comes back from there to the world of the living. Inanna is given a chance of returning by her fellow traveller, Nina Szubur, but the return is conditioned on her bringing someone else to the underworld. Her former lover is to be the sacrificial offering and his sister will partake in the sad obligation of staying in the underworld.The most striking aspect of the novel is the creation of a world in which the myth happens in a futuristic, cyberpunk environment. The characters use holographic maps, the kingdom of the underworld is shown as the undergrounds of a futuristic city, and the Father Gods whom Nina Szuber asks for help, resemble technocrats from some evil corporation. Literary critic Przemysław Czapliński observes that 'Tokarczuk has invented a genre, a language and a brand new way of speaking just for this book'.
Tokarczuk's Flights is not a travel book, but a book about the phenomenon of travel. After a mythographic novel with emotional ties to the described place Tokarczuk has surprised readers with a study of the psychology of travelling. At the same time the book's title is the name of an old Orthodox sect which believed that staying put made one vulnerable to the attacks of Evil, while continuous moving helped to redeem the soul. A similar motivation, though more secular and stemming from the longing for freedom, drives the heroes of each of the novel's themes. There is a woman who looks after a disabled child and who does not return home because of a revelation she experienced in church; an Australian researcher who revisits Poland years later, coming to see her terminally ill friend; a mother who takes her child and leaves her husband while on a family holiday in Croatia. There is also a story of Chopin's heart being transported to Poland, and one of a seventeenth-century anatomist, professor Ruysch, his daughter and his collection of specimens which gets ultimately sold to tsarist Russia.
With its many inter-connected themes, the structure of Flights brings to mind what Tokarczuk did in House of Day, House of Night. The concept worked well then - and it does so now, too.
Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (Drive Your Plough Through the Bones of the Dead) was released in 2009. In the novel she toys with the genre of suspense while addressing the issue of a 'human' way of treating animals. Anne-Dore Krohn of the German kulturradio remarques 'it is a fantastic book. It is a deeply pessimistic and melancholic story about environment protection, set in the scenery of Silesian mountains, with an intertwined motif of suspense'. The book was brought to the big screen by Agnieszka Holland in 2017. The film titled Pokot (Spoor) was premiered at the Berlin film festival and won Berlin’s prestigious Silver Bear.
In 2012, Tokarczuk published Moment niedźwiedzia (The Bear’s Moment) a collection of articles, prefaces, occasional pieces, thoughts, and humorous feuilletons which unexpectedly becomes an important compendium of the writer’s philosophy. It is also a political manifesto, a literary reaction to violence, exploitation, lies and propaganda promulgated by those in power that Tokarczuk considers one of her primary writerly obligations. The political and the literary are never divided by Tokarczuk.
In 2014, a long-awaited, and written over the period of six years The Books of Jacob was published by Wydawnictwo Literackie. It is not merely a novel about the past. It can be read as a reflective and sometimes mystical text concerning history, its twists and turns that determine the fortunes of entire nations. Almost a thousand pages, several dozen threads and characters The books of Jacob is an epically impressive novel, multifaceted and open to a wide range of interpretations. The story is set in 1752, the region of Podolia (part of Lesser Poland Province of the Polish Crown and revolves around a Jew named Jacob Leibowitz Frank. The mysterious newcomer from remote Smyrna begins to preach ideas that quickly introduce discord into the Jewish community. Considered a heretic by some and a saviour by others, he is soon surrounded by a circle of devoted disciples, and the unrest he finduced may change the course of history.
Olga Tokarczuk draws extensively on the tradition of historical novel, broadening the scope of this genre. She depicts the epoch with meticulous care, including architecture, costumes, scents. We visit estate manors, Catholic presbyteries and Jewish homes, engrossed in prayer and mysterious scriptures. Before the readers’ very eyes, the writer weaves an image of Poland in its former days, when Christianity, Judaism, as well as Islam, co-existed side by side.
Biography
Olga Tokarczuk is adored by her readers and lauded by critics and literature scholars; she is the author of nine novels and several collections of short stories and essays, has won many awards, and is the mostly widely translated Polish female writer. Her books have been translated into twenty-nine languages, including Chinese, Estonian, and Japanese, and translations of her latest novels are soon to be appearing in Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Born in 1962, Olga Tokarczuk first gained popularity with her books set in the Kłodzko Valley, where she lived in a small village for many years. These seemingly modest books discussed themes around settling down and making roots in a new place. The complicated history of those lands straddled by Poland, Czechia, and Germany inspired Tokarczuk’s imagination and made her writing evolve towards mythological tales, allowing her to capture something of the strangeness of existence. Tokarczuk also enjoys finding a space between epochs and literary genres, testing and transgressing their rules and boundaries. This explains her splendid reinterpretation of the Sumerian myth of the goddess Immam (Anna In in the Tombs of the World), which sits alongside multi-layered contemporary novels (Day House, Night House or Flights); a pastiche environmental detective novel, which borrows its title from William Blake (Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead); and a monumental work telling the tale of a false Messiah in the eighteenth century (The Books of Jacob).
Books interview Fiction in translation
Interview
Olga Tokarczuk: ‘I was very naive. I thought Poland would be able to discuss the dark areas of our history’
Claire Armitstead
A literary star in Poland, Olga Tokarczuk is hotly tipped to win the Man Booker international prize. She talks about facing controversy at home and the armed bodyguards hired to protect her
Claire Armitstead @carmitstead
Fri 20 Apr 2018 07.00 EDT Last modified on Sat 21 Apr 2018 18.09 EDT
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Olga Tokarczuk
‘When I read English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things’ … Olga Tokarczuk. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
When Olga Tokarczuk’s sixth novel, Flights, was about to be published in the UK last year the Bookseller trilled that “she is probably one of the greatest living writers you have never heard of”. The trade weekly, speaking specifically to a UK readership, can be forgiven for making such a bald assertion – even though she has had two previous novels translated into English – since it is only now that Flights has been shortlisted for the Man Booker international prize that Tokarczuk has begun to command the sort of attention in the English-speaking world that her home fans would consider her due. She has long been one of Poland’s highest profile writers – a vegetarian feminist in an increasingly reactionary, patriarchal country, and a public intellectual whose every utterance can make news headlines.
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Flights combines (among other things) the observations of a fretful modern traveller with the story of a wandering Slavic sect, a biography of a 17th-century Flemish anatomist and an account of the posthumous journey of Chopin’s heart from Paris, where the Polish composer died, to his desired resting place in Warsaw.
I meet Tokarczuk before an interview at the British Library by the critic Adam Mars-Jones, who wrote a highly complimentary review of Flights in the London Review of Books. “It could almost be an inventory of the ways narrative can serve a writer short of, and beyond, telling a story,” he said. “The book’s prose is a lucid medium in which narrative crystals grow to an ideal size, independent structures not disturbing the balance of the whole.”
Tokarczuk prefers an astronomical metaphor, explaining that, just as the ancients looked at stars in the sky and found ways to group them and then to relate them to the shapes of creatures or figures, so what she calls her “constellation novels” throw stories, essays and sketches into orbit, allowing the reader’s imagination to form them into meaningful shapes.
Our previous meeting was a year earlier in a Warsaw cafe, when Flights had yet to be published in the UK. The vagaries of English translation meant we were there to discuss a novel that was originally published in 2007. She is currently best known in Poland for a 900-page historical epic called The Books of Jacob published in 2014 (and due out in English next year).
In Poland, Tokarczuk was branded a 'targowiczanin' – an ancient term for traitor
Set on the border between modern-day Ukraine and Poland, The Books of Jacob tells the story of Jakub Frank, a Jewish-born religious leader who led the forcible conversion of fellow Jews to Catholicism in the 18th century. The novel itself was well received, selling 170,000 copies in hardback and winning her a second Nike award, known as “the Polish Booker”. But in a television interview after the award Tokarczuk outraged rightwing patriots by saying that, contrary to its self-image as a plucky survivor of oppression, Poland itself had committed “horrendous acts” of colonisation at times in its history. She was branded a “targowiczanin” – an ancient term for traitor – and her publisher had to hire bodyguards for a while to protect her. “I was very naive. I thought we’d be able to discuss the dark areas in our history,” she said.
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Days later she sailed into another controversy, when a film of her 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – titled Pokot (Spoor) – was premiered at the Berlin film festival. Scripted by Tokarczuk in collaboration with director Agnieszka Holland, it was denounced by a Polish news agency as “a deeply anti-Christian [work] that promoted eco-terrorism”. It went on to take Berlin’s prestigious Silver Bear, and, at a joint press conference, the duo were jubilant. “We are thinking of putting it on the promotional posters,” joked Holland, “because it will encourage people who might otherwise not have bothered to come and see it.”
Pokot (Spoor) Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead Tokarczuk Agnieszka Holland.
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Existential thriller … A scene from the award-winning film Pokot (Spoor), based on Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead and scripted by Tokarczuk and Agnieszka Holland.
Readers who have come to Tokarczuk’s work through Flights are likely to be disorientated by Drive Your Plow, which will be published in English this autumn. It is a strongly voiced existential thriller, in which an elderly eccentric living in a remote village finds her quiet life overturned as first a neighbour, then a police chief and a local bigwig are found battered to death.
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She wrote the novel between Flights and The Books of Jacob and her explanation is disarming, involving a two-book deal and a handy fashion for detective stories. “But just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time, so I decided to put into it animal rights and a story of dissenting citizens who realise that the law is immoral and see how far can they can go with saying no to it.”
Hunting has become a hot political issue in Poland since the novel was published, but at the time few were thinking about it. “Some people said that once again Tokarczuk is an old crazy woman doing weird things, but then this big discussion started on the internet about what we can do about this very patriarchal, Catholic tradition.”
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Characteristically of this magpie writer, the title is stolen from William Blake’s revolutionary manifesto The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Not only is each chapter prefaced with lines of Blake’s poetry, but the protagonist has befriended a young translator whose attempt to render the poet into Polish at one point creates five different versions of a single stanza, causing a severe headache for Tokarczuk’s own translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones (American Jennifer Croft is responsible for Flights). One might almost suspect Tokarczuk of making fun when she gave her character the line: “Right at the start, a dispute arose over whether we should translate the English word ‘mental’ as mentalny – ‘mental’ in the literal sense, ‘of the mind’ – or duchowy – more like ‘spiritual’.”
Like her protagonist, Tokarczuk and her partner Grzegorz Zegadło – a translator specialising in German – live in rural Lower Silesia, a southern region of Poland that only became part of the country after the second world war. “I’m lucky to have such an empty piece of land to describe because in Polish literature there are no legends or fairytales about it,” she says.
It is “a very special place” with a Tuscan micro-climate, which became a sacred space for members of the “68 generation” – hippies and artists, not to mention several translators of Blake, who had discovered the poet in the false dawn of the late 60s, along with the music of the Doors and the Animals.
She quit as a psychologist after 'working with one of my patients and realising I was much more disturbed than he was'
Tokarczuk was six years old, and living in the small town of Sulechów, when the student protests of 1968 erupted. Her father’s family were refugees from a part of Poland that is now in Ukraine. Both parents were teachers who “lived in an island of leftwing intellectuals, but not communists”, and whose book-lined house filled their daughter’s head with the possibility of becoming an author.
Instead, a “romantic notion of helping people” took her to Warsaw University, where she studied psychology and developed a fascination with the work of Carl Jung, which remains a cornerstone of her writing. After graduating she took a hospital job as a specialist in addiction, married a fellow psychologist and gave birth to a son. But after five years, she decided she was too fragile to continue at the hospital. “I was working with one of my patients and realised I was much more disturbed than he was.”
She left her job and published a collection of poetry, quickly followed by a novel, The Journey of the People of the Book – a parable set in 17th-century France – which won a prize for best debut. Though the books, and the prizes, kept rolling in, in her mid‑30s Tokarczuk hit a crisis and decided she needed to take some time out to travel, wandering from Taiwan to New Zealand on her own, and taking her young son off to Malaysia one particularly cold Polish winter. With her trademark dreadlocks she looks as though she left part of her heart on the hippie trail, though – as she has explained with a characteristically informal scholarliness – her hairstyle is actually a plica polonica, or “Polish tangle”, reports of which date back to the 17th century. “In a certain sense we can be proud to have introduced this hairstyle to Europe,” she said. “Plica polonica should be added to the list of our inventions, alongside crude oil, pierogi and vodka.”
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Today, she combines writing with co-hosting a boutique literary festival near her home. Though widely published throughout Europe, her books are only slowly emerging in the anglophone world. House of Day, House of Night (1998/2003), introduced her “constellation” style in a patchwork of stories, lists and essays a set in her home village across a wide historical timescale, while Primeval and Other Times chronicled the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious settlement over 80 years from 1914, from the point of view of the four archangels appointed to guard it. Published in 1996, it was only translated in 2009.
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk review – the ways of wanderers
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The literature of central Europe is very different from that of the west, she explains. “The first thing is that we don’t trust reality as much as you do. Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate. In such a form you can develop a story in a very linear way, but we don’t have this patience. We feel that in every moment something must be wrong because our own story wasn’t linear. Another difference is that you are rooted in psychoanalysis while we’re still thinking in a mythical, religious way.”
There’s a pause, as she zooms out to a wider historical focus: “If your country is wiped off the map and your language is banned, if your literature has to serve a cause, it becomes, however brilliant, rather hard to travel.” Or, seen from the other side, as it is so brilliantly and sardonically in Flights: “Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.”
Print Marked Items
Flights
Publishers Weekly.
265.23 (June 4, 2018): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Flights
Olga Tokarczuk, trans. from the Polish by Jennifer Croft. Riverhead, $26 (416p) ISBN 978-0-525-53419-8
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize, this novel from Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night) is an indisputable masterpiece of
"controlled psychosis," as one of the characters phrases it. Written in a cacophony of voices, the book's themes accumulate not from plot, but
rather associations and resonances. It begins in Croatia, where a tourist, Kunicki, is lazily smoking cigarettes beside his car in an island olive
grove, waiting for his wife and son to return from a short walk. Except they don't, and Kunicki must frantically search for his lost family in a sundrenched
paradise, 10 kilometers in diameter. The novel then, after some number of pages and disjointed narratives, joins the peculiar anatomist
Dr. Blau's journey to the seaside village home of a recently deceased rival. This prompts the retelling of the sad, true tale of Angelo Soliman, born
in Nigeria, who had Jived as a dignified and respected Viennese courtier, only to be mummified and displayed by Francis I as a racial specimen
"wearing only a grass band." This rumination on anatomy brings into the text the anatomist Philip Verheyen, born in 1648 in Flanders, who keeps
his amputated leg, preserved in alcohol, on the headboard of his bed. The novel continues in this vein--dipping in and out of submerged stories,
truths, and flights of fantasy stitched together by associations. Punctuated by maps and figures, the discursive novel is reminiscent of the work of
Sebald. The threads ultimately converge in a remarkable way, making this an extraordinary accomplishment. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Flights." Publishers Weekly, 4 June 2018, p. 30. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542242826/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b11d462a. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542242826
Tokarczuk, Olga: FLIGHTS
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Tokarczuk, Olga FLIGHTS Riverhead (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 14 ISBN: 978-0-525-53419-8
Thoughts on travel as an existential adventure from one of Poland's most lauded and popular authors.
Already a huge commercial and critical success in her native country, Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night, 2003) captured the attention of
Anglophone readers when this book was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. In addition to being a fiction writer,
Tokarczuk is also an essayist and a psychologist and an activist known--and sometimes reviled--for her cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist views. Her
wide-ranging interests are evident in this volume. It's not a novel exactly. It's not even a collection of intertwined short stories, although there are
longer sections featuring recurring characters and well-developed narratives. Overall, though, this is a series of fragments tenuously linked by the
idea of travel--through space and also through time--and a thoughtful, ironic voice. Movement from one place to another, from one thought to
another, defines both the preoccupations of this discursive text and its style. One of the extended stories follows a man named Kunicki whose
wife and child disappear on vacation--and suddenly reappear. A first-person narrator offers a sort of memoir through movement, recalling her
own peregrinations bit by bit. There are pilgrims and holidaymakers. Tokarczuk also explores the connection between travel and colonialism with
side trips into "exotic" practices and cabinets of curiosity. There are philosophical digressions, like a meditation on the flight from Irkutsk to
Moscow that lands at the same time it takes off. None of this is to say that this book is dry or didactic. Tokarczuk has a sly sense of humor. It's
impossible not to laugh at the opening line, "I'm reminded of something that Borges was once reminded of...." Of course someone interested in
maps and territories, of the emotional landscape of travel and the difference between memory and reality would feel an affinity for the Argentine
fabulist.
A welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Tokarczuk, Olga: FLIGHTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723415/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5aff03d7. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723415
Homelands, adopted homelands: four new Polish poets
at our door
John Taylor
The Antioch Review.
73.3 (Summer 2015): p570+.
COPYRIGHT 2015 Antioch Review, Inc.
Full Text:
Nothing More by Krystyna Mitob^dzka, translated by Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese, Arc Publications, 153 pp., $16.99.
Kopenhaga by Grzegorz Wroblewski, translated by Piotr Gwiazda, Zephyr Press, 158 pp., $15.00.
Colonies by Tomasz Rozycki, translated by Mira Rosenthal, Zephyr Press, 163 pp., $15.00.
Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance by Wioletta Greg, translated by Marek Kazmierski, Arc Publications, 123 pp., $15.49.
All of a sudden four Polish poets knock on your door and you're delighted to let them in. You've met only one of them before and, at that, all too
briefly. She (Wioletta Greg) has in fact journeyed from the Isle of Wight, a second poet has arrived from Copenhagen, whereas the third hails
from the town of Opole and the fourth from Puszczykowo, a much smaller town located near Poznan. This is Poland and the Polish diaspora.
Their respective poetics differ markedly. The poet from Puszczykowo, Krystyna Milobedzka (b. 1932), is probably the most forward of the
quartet. And her translator, Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese, is up to the task in Nothing More, the poet's first and stimulating appearance in English. The
translator's resourcefulness shows forth from the onset when she takes the unusual liberty of occasionally leaving a few blank spaces where
Milobedzka has placed a comma. A minor detail, you might retort--but nie, it is not. The (not systematically) absent comma and other technical
stratagems provide an effective means of suggesting the "immense flexibility" of Polish syntax, as the translator puts it in her enlightening
preface, and the "portmanteau parsing" that she had to carry out in order to render the semantic layers of the original poems--which, however,
often seem simple on the surface. Here is a (deceptively) simple piece, "This Cut-Out Suits Me," a title that almost unwittingly alludes to the
translator's comma-deleting method:
You I can hear you, hidden and big month after moon growing
fuller--or is it me? One more, closer, ear--could it be me? when mine? I
sit
and walk what's visible what's edible
go to sleep now, it will do you good
until I, don't you cry, until I bite it in two
As should already be evident, "experimental"--an adjective sometimes applied to Milobedzka--is neither a sufficient nor even a necessary
qualification. More precisely, she meditates on the impossibilities of immediacy, that is, on the barriers or filters--language foremost among them-
-that rise up between the self and nature, the self and time, between the self and the other (the "you"), indeed between the self and the self. "Or is
it me?" she asks here, and then: "Could it be me?" This question is essential in her work; it crops up in different ways. Sometimes the poet's goal
seems not so much to express as to efface the self, which is itself viewed as the barrier or the filter. "Write write on till you vanish in writing," she
notably declares in a two-line untitled poem, "look look on till you vanish in looking." Once again, we find that ongoing European grappling with
subjectivity, the subject, the "I." In another poem, she writes that "there must be a reason why I dream that I am" and, still elsewhere, observes
that "our am [is] on the verge of the lawn." A poetic Descartes à la polonaise ?
For Milobedzka, the poem is constituted by the very process of formulating such questions, speculations, and paradoxes. In this sense, her pieces
pace philosophically along paths full of ideas, notions, and conjectures. Moreover, the reality to which her poetics lead tends to be sparse, bare,
elemental--though no wasteland. This is unsurprising in that she is skeptical of the illusory qualities of rhetoric. She often pares away linguistic
superfluities; language is at once the tool and the obstacle to the tool. With its single quotation marks, one line sums up succinctly this issue of
language-as-impediment: "here a house besides a house without 'here is a house.'" In one untitled poem, she evokes this entire stripping-down
procedure:
I lose verbs quickest, nouns, things remain.
now only personal pronouns (lots of I, more and more I)
and names? lost, conjunctions lost
three words, two words
finally my--mine in me
mine with me--
world
I am the first and last person
Descartes once again? Solipsism? That is, as opposed to the vanishing self envisioned in the other poem cited above? Her work delves into this
dichotomy. Another piece sporting with personal pronouns suddenly becomes more personal, when her son comes into the poem at the end. The
presence of the "you," the Other, indeed the son, implies the onset, for the poet, of a new existential but also ontological relationship with that
which is outside the self. At the same time, she hesitates on a kind of threshold:
to here
here, not there
there where he is
is where he was
was where he will be because
everywhere's fine wherever we are not
no, we are not there
there, not here!
here where we are
we are where we were
we will be where we were, son--from you on I was supposed
to start with new words, but I don't know how
Will Milobedzka be able to cross this threshold and find those words? Toward the end of the collection, one poem attempts an answer. The
translation of this poem is audacious since, if I have analyzed it correctly (with a bilingual dictionary and my love for languages in lieu of any
competence in this one), Wójcik-Leese probes deeply into the Polish verb "to be" as it appears in an untitled poem beginning "jest rosacea
drzewem / jest plynace ..." There is no "the" in the Polish, just the "jest" (is). Wójcik-Leese brilliantly adds "the" in English, revealing in the
process how designation, showing, or naming are fundamental existential and ontological acts; and note the reconciliation between the "I," "the
world," and the "You" at the end:
the is growing into a tree
the is flowing
the is running, the is flying
the is from the beginning
the is not what it should be
the is not the one, the is to the end
the is there is not, the is there is
the is--I am
the world with You
After reading Milobedzka, it occurs to me that the "I" is not so much a homeland, as an adopted homeland. And "you" too! ...
Also bold is Grzeborz Wróblewski (b. 1962). He is the Pole from Copenhagen and the author of Kopenhaga. The able translator, Piotr Gwiazda,
spends some time, in his elucidating introduction, trying to define the arresting short-prose form employed by Wroblewski, a genre that is
"perhaps the most unique and personal portion of his oeuvre." "Although critics and reviewers in Poland describe these writings as 'poetic prose'
or 'experimental prose,'" the translator specifies, "I prefer to call them 'prose poems.'" Gwiazda supports his argument by appealing to the texts'
"thematic cohesion (with a focus on the self's interaction with the world), musicality, immediacy, brevity, serial construction," adding that they
also reflect Baudelaire's notion of the prose poem as conveying the "lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of reverie, the flip flops of
consciousness." So be it, though it is not less useful to think as well of Wroblewski's pieces, which include many personal reflections, on-the-spot
notes, and diary-like jottings, as prose that is neither especially poetic nor experimental, but rather concise, pithy, and provocative. Some of the
texts also often show a pronounced narrative quality:
Weird autistic activities: The fat guy is boring a hole through a piece of paper for two hours. Nothing else, just boring a hole. My job? I have to
make sure he DOESN'T HURT ANYONE. This dangerous lump of fat, what is he contemplating? Probably the same things Kierkegaard was
contemplating. Regina and eating shrimp. The desert. Earth. Suddenly he speaks. He notices I'm jotting something.
--"What are you doing?" he asks.
--"Writing a letter."
--"To whom?"
--"To myself."
We continue to bore holes. Each his own.
Actually, this piece is not all that far removed from some of the poems written by Milobedzka in which the self and the other are at once opposed
as contraries, juxtaposed as similarities, and perhaps are one and the same in the first place. But Wróblewski is more down-to-earth, much more
blatantly autobiographical, sometimes graphic, and often funny:
Cactuses. They know all about our money problems. (They know our ex-lovers by heart.) They grow fastest when we are not at home.
Yet this adept of gallows humor and sardonic quip is not without a more secret side, as in this subtle allusion to his expatriation to Denmark,
where he has been living since 1985:
A letter from the insurance company PFA. My life is currently worth 7,993 Danish crowns. (The amount my family will get if I unexpectedly
relocate to the next world.) Cosmic Loneliness. Thank you, Krystopher, I will keep you in my thoughts when I'm underground. A unique
combination of protein and paranoia: 1,330 bottles of beer (or four plane tickets to Poland.)
Another kind of relocation and exile is at stake in Colonies, by Tomasz Rózycki (b. 1970), the poet from Opale. Gracefully translated by Mira
Rosenthal, this seventy-seven-piece sonnet sequence is inspired by the historical and geographical turmoil that this poet's native region has
undergone ever since World War II. In her excellent introduction, the translator explains that the poet's hometown, "known before 1945 as Oppeln
and located in Germany, was settled with Polish citizens when Poland's borders were shifted west after World War II. Rózycki's family, forced to
leave Lwów in the east (now Lviv in Ukraine), was among those relocated."
Rosenthal interestingly adds that Rózycki's "writing is at once an attempt to free himself from this inherited history and an enactment of his
failure to do so." "How could childhood's paradise so quickly turn / to ash, be blown away?" Rózycki pointedly asks, all the while noting in
another piece that his poems "would begin to take // the place of [his] own homeland ... // And what my poems touch on / would freeze in life and
crumble into small / particles, nearly turn to antimatter, / completely invisible dust, spinning / in the air a long time, till finally falling / into your
eye, making it start to water."
The "colonies" of the title thus refers to this specific emigration, although the poet was himself born a quarter-century later. Rosenthal observes
that Rózycki's "family history exerts an intense hold on him, reminding the reader that it is not just individuals who were displaced but the whole
country or, rather, countries." This resettlement and its consequences have been powerfully depicted before in contemporary Polish literature,
notably by the poet Adam Zagajewski (b. 1945) and the novelist Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962).
But Rózycki also expands his scope, generalizing upon the Polish predicament and evoking worldwide migration, flight, homelessness, temporary
resettlement, permanent foreignness. The poem cited above about the lost "children's paradise" is conspicuously titled, not "Lwów, but "Cape
Horn." Here is "Electric Eels," the tenth sonnet:
There are our colonies! Kuba has staked
them out with sticks and stones, except for borders,
because they spread across the summer.
To find them we have traveled this whole district
in a cramped position. And now we will
announce it to the world, as witness take
natives we've met, the lake, fish, crayfish, known
and unknown species. We will hang a flag
on a stick stuck into the sand. The space
our bodies fill will be its province till
the morning, till the time when others come.
We find their traces in the sand: bottle caps,
glass, fish spines, charcoal, unglued cardboard boxes,
and deeper--rags, pins, hair inside the earth.
As the sonnet sequence progresses, Rózycki draws compelling pictures of contemporary unwished-for mobility. He sometimes sets his own
inherited yet unreachable roots alongside empathy with rootlessness or even his own experiences of rootlessness, albeit short-lasting. In "Bauxite
and Cardamom," as he rides the Paris metro, he muses about his origins and concludes:
Maybe I'd found a way to shake off Central
Europe, those great gray fields of maneuvers
and barking dogs. The moment had arrived
when there was nowhere left in this vast city
to go, when one must choose a lover's discourse
or alcohol's warm touch. Aimlessly roaming
the nameless mazes, stations where dawn smolders.
In a manner remotely analogous to Milobedzka's hesitation on thresholds between the "I" and the "not-I," Rózycki uses the sonnet form to create
formally closed, yet psychologically open conclusions.
I first read Wioletta Greg's finely observed, sensitive, and richly humane poetry in 2011, when a selection was published as Smena's Memory by
Off Press, a small London press devoted to the translation of Polish literature. (Her author's name then was Wioletta Grzegorzwska, a change that
is also an expatriation.) Born in 1974, she moved to the United Kingdom in 2006 and lives on the Isle of Wight. This must be the island referred
to in the second stanza of "Swimming Lessons," a poem that shifts, rather like some of Rózycki's verse, from the particular to the global:
When I was six, my father taught me to swim
by throwing me off a raft in the middle of the lake.
When I rose again from the depths, he said
"Only the strong survive," then succumbed to
a heart attack on those same shores a decade later.
After he died, I moved to an island which, in half
a millennium, too will sink and vanish from all maps.
Its September storms leave me feeling restless.
As algae stamps the white cliffs, wind peeling
lavender fields from the earth, I drown and rise again.
Smena's Memory has been included in this larger collection, Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance, finely translated (as before) by Marek
Kazmierski. As in the above poem, Greg is especially moving when she evokes her family. Her father appears in several pieces. "Readers"
describes her mostly illiterate grandmother, stopped by typhoid from "finishing her first year / of school and all she ever remembered of it / was a
couple of verses from her alphabet book." Yet in Polish poetry, history is rarely far away. Here is how Greg relates her grandmother's survival:
Because she was better at baking delicious cakes
than reading, in nineteen forty three a German
officer spared her life, the smells of her kitchen
reminding him of his family home in Bavaria.
And this is not all. Greg concludes by mocking her own Polish accent, now that she has moved to England and speaks English most of the time:
When I speak, a beach becomes a bitch,
keys a kiss, a sheet shit. Not that long ago,
when trying to say I can't do a thing,
I would call myself a cunt.
So it is for the foreigner, as I know all too well.
Her long narrative poem, "Grandfather on His Way to Warsaw, September 1939-1945," is the most memorable of these family poems. The
grandfather is introduced as a Christ-like figure in that he was born of "Jósef and Marianna, a carpenter / like my father before me." The poem
then traces the man's life from his childhood, when he would pray at the chapel of the community's "holy guardian." Various perilous adventures
are undergone in adulthood. He was led into them by this Guardian Angel, whom he had beseeched to let him go to Warsaw; he thereafter escapes
them every time, also thanks to this Guardian Angel. Through her grandfather, Greg evokes the tragic history of her homeland in the twentieth
century: the man gets captured by the Germans, but manages to flee, "the SS dogs" overlooking him in the process; he finds his house in ruins at
the end of the war; he avoids a communist militia group searching for him, but gets arrested by the secret police and winds up in prison. The last
four strophes each resonantly end with the word "kamyk" (stone), for this carpenter has been forced "to make so many grave stones." And as he
daydreams in his prison bed about "lying in a hotel, watching the streets of Warsaw," he realizes how his childhood prayer, to the holy guardian of
the village chapel, for that chance to go to Warsaw, has been answered by the events of his tragic life. But note the last line:
I, a carpenter, son of Jósef, born on a stone floor,
all my life escaping the Guardian Angel of Warsaw.
Let my heart never turn to stone.
There is much humanity in Greg's collection. Unlike most English-language collections of poetry, it ends with a diary-like section in prose.
"Notes from an Island" traces Greg's relationship with the island, from her first year ("The Isle of Wight is becoming part of me"), to more recent
years when the perceptions become more troubling. In the last entry, dated January 1,2014, she asks her daughter: "Maybe we should move to
London?" And her daughter replies: "Yes, but how will we survive without the sea?" Survival and frequent leave-taking provide key themes for
all these four Polish poets, be their exiles inside themselves or from homelands, even from adopted homelands.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Taylor, John. "Homelands, adopted homelands: four new Polish poets at our door." The Antioch Review, Summer 2015, p. 570+. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A423356208/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=60a3677d. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A423356208
Best European Fiction 2011
Publishers Weekly.
257.35 (Sept. 6, 2010): p23.
COPYRIGHT 2010 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Best European Fiction 2011
Edited by Aleksandar Hemon. Dalkey Archive, $16.95 trade paper (522p) ISBN 978-1-56478-600-5
With authors ranging from the familiar (Hilary Mantel) to the obscure (Macedonia's Blaze Minevski) to the internationally acclaimed but
underappreciated in the U.S.A. (Spain's Enrique Vila-Matas; Hungary's Laszlo Krasznahorkai; Poland's Olga Tokarczuk), the second volume of
this lauded series makes good on the first's promise. Zurab Lezhava's "Sex for Fridge" is the madcap story of a Georgian woman who tries to
trade her body for a discount on a run-down refrigerator. Iulian Ciocan's "Auntie Frosea" takes as its depressing protagonist an impoverished
Moldovan housewife whose only knowledge of the world outside her village comes from the beamed-in Brazilian soap opera she's addicted to.
There's also plenty of Euro-surrealism: Olga Tokarczuk's haunting "The Ugliest Woman in the World" tells the story of a man who marries and
has kids with a rather unbecoming woman, while Laszlo Krasznahorkai's "The Bill" is a nine-page, one-sentence meditation on the zone between
male desire and possession. With stories from Montenegro, Cyprus, and even tiny Liechtenstein aside works from Turkey, Estonia, and most of
Western Europe, this edition packs both a stylistic punch and a satisfying range. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Best European Fiction 2011." Publishers Weekly, 6 Sept. 2010, p. 23. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A237064690/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8809d26d. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A237064690
Primeval and Other Times
Whitney Scott
Booklist.
106.16 (Apr. 15, 2010): p29.
COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Primeval and Other Times.
By Olga Tokarczuk. Tr. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Apr. 2010. 248p. Twisted Spoon, $15.50 (9788086264356).
Tokarczuk won Poland's Koscielski Foundation Prize with this vision of the twentieth-century in an imaginary Eastern European village
consisting of four guardian angels and a range of human characters--a world apart that yet mirrors reality beyond its boundaries. Tokarczuk first
describes Primeval, noting place-name derivations and remarking, "It is God's business to create, and people's business to name." Section
headings denote changes in location, time, and point of view. Focal shifts build an engrossing, multifaceted mosaic, including individuals like
Cornspike, an unlikely subject for revelation, who lives in the wild; steals food; turns to whoring; suffers solitary stillbirth in an abandoned,
tumbledown house; and then is blessed with a surprising epiphany when she sees "the force that pervades everything [and] the contours of other
worlds and other times." In Primeval, shape-shifting elements of nature coexist seamlessly with a character taming snakes into peaceful
domesticity by the hearth, Nazi concentration camps, and God grieving his unrequited love for man within a mystical labyrinth of eight spheres or
worlds. It's well worth the long visit.--Whitney Scott
Scott, Whitney
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Scott, Whitney. "Primeval and Other Times." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2010, p. 29. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A224774929/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ff015307. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A224774929
Księgi Jakubowe (The Books of Jacob)
Posted by Malgorzata Dzieduszycka-Ziemilska on January 31, 2016 at 12:26 am
untitled
Księgi Jakubowe (THE BOOKS OF JACOB, or a great journey through seven borderlands, five languages and three major religions, not counting smaller ones)
by Olga Tokarczuk
Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 2014
You wander into the pages of The Books of Jacob as you might stroll through a lively museum or explore a mysterious dwelling. Soon, the setting and the characters so grab you in the first fistful of pages (out of the book’s 900!) that you are left captive, spellbound. Here I was, a creature of the twenty-first century, living and breathing the air of the novel’s late-seventeenth century.
I kept reading the epic, off and on, through my three-week stay in a sanatorium. In barely a few days, I was in a haze: which was my daily life and which was the fiction? Of the two, Tokarczuk’s world was certainly the more compelling, the more multifaceted, its splendours more seductive. By contrast, the tedium of convalescent existence was unredeemed by the installments, on the news, of my country’s current, pitiful, constitutional psychodrama.
So I impatiently returned to The Books of Jacob. I seldom spoke to others, reluctant to disrupt Tokarczuk’s tale. And I rejoiced in the books’ heft, glad to weigh it in the hand, delighted at its pleasing, attractive presentation: a beautiful object, like an antique treasure box.
The story is that of an almost forgotten episode in the history of the ancient Polish Republic, namely the curious conversion to Christianity by a sizeable group of East-European Jews. This occurred in the declining years leading to Poland’s partitions, over a territory stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Among the area’s many peoples, Jews formed a tight, separate, well-knit society. Distinguished by their religion, customs, language and dress, they obeyed their own laws, governed their own institutions, set up their own state within each of the states where they settled. What they lacked, was their own land. Although not nomads, many of them constantly moved across vast territories, for business, for education, for visiting or in search of safety and peace. Throughout, they kept up their specific conversation with God.
It so happens that one of them, Jacob Lejbowicz Frank – an undaunted rebel roaming in the steppes of Podolia, today’s Ukraine – renounced the Talmud, proclaimed himself a Messiah, and sought
Jakub Lejbowicz Frank
Jakub Lejbowicz Frank
enlightenment in the Book of Zohar, plunging into the Kaballah’s mystical revelations. His followers quickly multiplied and he finally led them, through a variety of political and religious upheavals, to baptism in the Catholic Church.
This charismatic figure is the book’s main character. The lively, eventful storyline rests on authentic historic events. We recognize facts and people remembered from familiar textbooks. But it is Tokarczuk’s writing we admire, so characteristic yet also full of unexpected twists. She spins unusual harmonies between narration, dialogue and reflection, composing her novel like a piece of music. Its rhythms seduce the reader. The narrators’ voices succeed one another in space and time, surrounding Jacob Frank and his widespread, thickly knit community – sometimes from the outside – but soon mixing in with the worshippers, swept up by history. We follow their footsteps. Sometimes, we’re caught off balance – since Tokarczuk’s world is like the one we live in: crystal clear at moments, at others romantically foggy. And the complex links between characters both appear — and disappear — from eyesight.
The author’s language is captivating, peering into deeper meanings and raising surprising flashes to the surface. At one point, for instance, she plays with the word ‘impatience’ and its various senses. Sometimes the reader must backtrack to check on a name, to correct one’s recollection of events or characters. Now we see everything through the eyes of Nachman, Jacob’s associate. Then through the prism of old Jenta suspended between heaven and earth, between life and dying. We are party to the story of Moliwda, a son of traditional Polish gentry, or follow the doings of two energetic women, Kossakowska and Drużbacka. We view the dilemmas of Chmielowski the priest, Dembowski the bishop, the notations of the parish scribe. Many of these figures existed, their biographies can be checked on Wikipedia. But Tokarchuk fleshes them out. She skillfully garbs them, surrounds them with their everyday objects, dwellings, landscapes – and hardest of all – manages to give each one his or her personality. Each has distinctive yearnings, ambitions, dismays, passions, pools of kindness and rottenness. Tokarczuk weaves this complexity into an impressive array of relationships.
The Polish women in The Books of Jacob ride firmly astride their surrounding reality, they anticipate events and steer them, they ceaselessly attempt to guide the lives of others. The Jewish women are carried by fate, they fascinate the senses, make reason waver, but they do not themselves try to bend fate. They are pliant to men on the surface but, well aware of men’s failings, they wield much power. These women, Chaya, Chana, Gilta, Avacha-Eva channel mysterious forces, they hold keys to the universe and to timelessness.
Even though the logic of events constantly yields to mysticism and the surreal, the book’s chronology abides by historic time. The men and women in these pages mature, age, pass away, memories of them fade and in subsequent generations are deformed.
I learned much from Tokarczuk’s book. Though the story owes much to the author’s fancy, it brings us close to the lives of Jacob Frank and his followers, the Frankist movement. Brilliantly depicted, this sizeable slice of southeastern European history singularly illustrates the entwined fates of Jews and Poles.
Closing the book, I wonder: what most amazed me ? Surely its skillful portraits of a community, revealing its lines of strength, and the ability of one man, a leader, to enhance and manipulate these various skeins.
The portrayed characters are convincing, the depicted events credible. The only thing I found doubtful was the leading superstition’s conclusion – not because it seemed over drastic, but perhaps a little too simplistic. Things may, however, so have happened. But I must refrain from jumping the gun, spoiling the plot.
The Books of Jacob – Olga Tokarczuk
#language & literature
The Books of Jacob – Olga Tokarczuk
Author: Culture.pl
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In Księgi Jakubowe / The Books of Jacob, Tokarczuk took on a new role: a pugnacious 21st-century prophetess who reaches back into the history of the nation to properly shake it up, grill it and interpret it in her own way.
The Books of Jacob, or a great journey through seven borders, five languages and three major religions, not counting the small ones (editor's translation) ... is an insane book. Everything is insane here, starting from its length (900 pages), full title (consisting of several lines), and pagination (‘from the end’, as a tribute to books written in Hebrew, and as a reminder that ‘every order is a matter of habit’). The very physical encounter with The Books (announced, long-awaited, and written over the period of six years, both confuses and throws one out of one's ‘comfort zone’.
The story itself doesn’t make the reader comfortable either. Although one can discern a distant echo of Olga Tokarczuk’s previous books The Journey of the Book – People and Primeval and Other Times, the territory through which she leads us this time seems much more unpredictable. The story is set in 1752, the region of Podolia (part of Lesser Poland Province of the Polish Crown), a picturesque world, yet devoured by suffering and poverty, and full of dirty yards and ulcerated old women. A man named Jakub Lejbowicz Frank announces that he is the Messiah, which marks the birth of heresy within Judaism that later will be called Frankism. His followers reject the law of Moses and the Talmud in favor of Kabbalah, they believe in the Trinity and the Virgin (sometimes identified with Virgin Mary), and they seal their beliefs by converting to Catholicism.
Tokarczuk goes back to the moment in Polish history that has not been elaborated on so far by any other author. Perhaps, this extraordinary story required an equally exceptional narrator. It was her very anarcho-mystical approach that enabled to show Poland as a both familiar (manors, bishops, shtetls) and unfamiliar place, a country whose religious tolerance and Catholic identity has been called into question. The Frankist heresy was conceived in a multinational, mixed and diverse society. As a mystical but also pragmatic movement it disregarded limitations of tradition, dogma and custom. In today’s discourse it could be defined in terms of a challenge to stale identities and forms, as a prologue to anarchism and socialism. Moreover, the phenomenon described by Tokarczuk is very ambiguous, just as ambiguous is the figure of Jakub Frank, a mystic and a despot, revolutionary and strategist, quack and sage.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the story of Frank captivated Tokarczuk at this time. There is a sense of a collective urge for self-determination in the air. The Polish account of its past invites new interpretations and leaves room for new, unobvious narratives at the personal level as much as at the level of the entire population with its entangled Polish-Jewish heritage. Tokarczuk emphasizes in interviews that The Books of Jacob is her most ‘pro-social’ project, in which she leaves herself on the side, and writes about other people and for the people.
The Books of Jacob is also a pro-human book full of metaphysics. The search for answers to great questions (nature of evil, God’s interventions in human life) intertwine with poetic descriptions of the details of everyday life. And although the story is set in the 18th century and refers to seemingly esoteric and dark subject, it is nonetheless very important and very relevant today.
The True Face of Freemasonry
The True Face of Freemasonry
Poland owes some of its most impressive achievements in politics and civilization to Freemasonry – from the Four Years' Sejm and the Constitution of the 3rd of May, to the liberum conspiro tradition.
#photography & visual arts#language & literature#architecture#music#culture
Author: Aleksandra Lipczak, November 2014, ed.& transl. GS, April 2015
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OLGA TOKARCZUK’S PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES REVIEWED BY KATIE EBERHART
Primeval and Other Times
Olga Tokarczuk
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Twisted Spoon Press, Prague 2010
248 pp
Reviewed by Katie Eberhart
This novel begins with the boldly presented idea that Primeval is both a place and more than a place. The first thing we learn is that “Primeval is the place at the centre of the universe” and I reminded myself of Primeval’s exceptional location as I followed the intergenerational tableau anchored within a normal-seeming landscape in Poland of roads and forests, farms, rivers and lakes but along the borders four archangels are said to protect against certain human shortcomings.
In Primeval and Other Times each chapter or section begins “The Time of . . .” and the novel unfolds as separate but interlaced stories where characters appear, and reappear, sometimes in their own story and sometimes in another character’s story. Many characters are related to other characters by family, or accidental encounter, dreams or beliefs, and the characters are staunch in what they believe, whether it is a higher power, believing that the midwife switched the babies at birth, or a game that becomes an obsession.
Written in a straightforward prose, the stories span human actions and reactions, showing the inner workings of a community, the interactions between people, causes and effects, and beliefs and desires. For instance, “The Time of Genowefa” begins in 1914 when Genowefa’s husband Michał is suddenly taken away to fight in the Russian army. Misia is born while her father, Michał, is away at the war. (Misia is an adult with her own children when Primeval becomes the front during the Second World War.) As a child, Misia watched her father returning: “[her] first memory was the sight of the ragged man on the road to the mill. Her father staggered as he walked, and then often cried at night, . . .” and her father brought the grinder home from the war:
Misia’s grinder came into being because of someone’s hands combining wood, china and brass into a single object. The wood, china and brass made the idea of grinding materialize. Grinding coffee beans to pour boiling water on them afterwards. There is no one of whom it could be said that he invented the grinder, because creating is merely reminding yourself of what exists beyond time, in other words, since time began. Man is incapable of creating out of nothing – that is a divine skill. (44-45)
The grinder is not quite a talisman but one of its roles is to mark time because it is something which barely changes while people grow and age, wars are fought, and a lot happens. The grinder signifies endurance and continuity, much like the grist mill which, in a larger sense, anchors Primeval to the very basis of survival. But it isn’t just things that have a symbolic nature, characters also achieve a larger more representative role, such as Misia:
Like every person, Misia was born broken into pieces, incomplete, in bits. Everything in her was separate – looking, hearing, understanding, feeling, sensing, and experiencing. Misia’s entire future life would depend on putting it all together into a single whole, and then letting it fall apart. (42)
I was intrigued by the transformation of characters and indeed what might change a character’s life, and thus story, such as Florentynka who is an old woman living alone with her dogs and the explanation of her circumstances becomes part of the myth-making effect:
People think madness is caused by a great, dramatic event, some sort of suffering that is unbearable. They imagine you go mad for some reason. . . People also think madness strikes suddenly, all at once, in unusual circumstances, and that insanity falls on a person like a net, fettering the mind and muddling the emotions.
But Florentynka had gone mad in the normal course of things, you could say for no reason at all. . . . (52-53)
Tokarczuk has tackled a difficult task, to create a place, characters, and stories that exist in their own right but also within the stream of history, where the characters are both believable and beyond belief, where the extremes are pushed farther than what most of us have experienced and yet (the terrifying part) are anchored in twentieth century history. One result is questions like How can this be? How could this happen? which are the troubling questions about the times during which events in Primeval occurred.
Offsetting all of the changes though is a constancy—of space and time—so that the mill on the river continues to exist, whether there is grain or not, and also
There are lime trees lining the Highway leading from Jeszkotle to the Kielce road. They looked the same at the beginning, and they will look the same at the end. They have thick trunks and roots that reach deep into the earth, where they meet the foundations of everything that lives. . . . (188)
Primeval and Other Times is a carefully wrought fictional exploration of the light and dark elements of being. Tokarczuk’s strong voice and meticulous writing have brought these stories into existence making Primeval its own place with a compelling intergenerational drama that is set within the context of a history we know. Olga Tokarczuk’s novel tells important stories that will be of interest to anyone who is a student of human nature and history and who has ever wondered how mythologies develop; and Primeval and Other Times should be read by everyone because literature is one way we remember and learn from the past.
* * *
Katie Eberhart’s writing and poems exploring the fine margin between people and landscape can be found in the Palmer (Alaska) Arts Council poetry anthology Voices Between Mountains and the online literary journal Plasma Magazine. Katie was selected as an Artsmith Artist Resident in 2009 and has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop.
Book Reviews
from the May 2010 issue
Olga Tokarczuk’s “Primeval and Other Times”
Reviewed by Tara Bray Smith
Image of Olga Tokarczuk’s “Primeval and Other Times”
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Twisted Spoon Press, 2010
Then there is Primeval: protozoic, foundational, “the place at the centre of the universe.”
On April 10, 2010, heavy fog in the vicinity of the Russian forest of Katyn determined the fate of Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, and ninety-six other Polish leaders, including members of parliament, the heads of both the army and navy, the president of Poland’s national bank, and Anna Walentynowicz, the eighty-year-old former dockworker whose firing in 1980 catalyzed Solidarity. The fact that this rarest of delegations, bound from Warsaw to Smolensk on a Polish air force-flown Tupolev Tu-154, was flying to commemorate what has come to be known as the Katyn Massacre—the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers by Soviet secret police in 1940—compounded the almost unimaginable loss, shrouding the tragedy in a terrible symbolism. It was “the curse of Katyn,” a “second Katyn,” and the forest, “a damned place,” in the words of former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski. “They wanted to cut off our head there,” Lech Wałęsa said shortly after the crash, “and here the flower of our nation has also perished.”
In a Times op-ed, Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk offers her thoughts on the disaster:
I turned on the TV Sunday afternoon, and the more the night drew on, the more I heard words like nation, victim, mystical coincidence, sign, accursed place, true patriotism, Katyn, truth. Politicians who only a few days ago were at each other’s throats are now speaking, in trembling voices, of “deep meaning” and “the metaphysics of Katyn.” Not much more than 20 years ago, some of these same people suppressed the truth about the deaths at Katyn to follow the Communist Party line.
I am reminded that when a major trauma occurs, the kind that is both individual and collective, something happens that Jungian psychology calls an “abaissement du niveau mental”—a lowering of the level of consciousness. Intellect gives way to the gloom of the collective psyche. The horrified mind tries to find meaning, but lets itself be seduced by old myths.
It is a welcome analysis, especially considering Tokarczuk’s fiction often draws from the same well of symbolism that we do in searching for a reason for our calamities. Answers, even made-up ones, are balm against the pain of not knowing; or, borrowing from the language of Tokarczuk’s excellent novel Primeval and Other Times, recently translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones: “the sorrow that under[lies] everything. The sorrow that [is] present in every single thing, in every phenomenon . . . it’s impossible to grasp everything at once.”
Yet we try, over and over again, through narrative, through religion, to give order to the universe. It is this human desire that Tokarczuk hones in on in Primeval and Other Times, the story of three generations of a small Polish village called Primeval, from 1914 to the beginnings of Solidarity in 1980. Centered around the fate of the Niebieski family (Michał, Genowefa, Misia Boska, and Izydor), whose struggles and loves during a century of war and occupation determine the book’s dramatic arc, Primeval and Other Times is structured into short chapters, the “Times” of the novel’s title. Each Time tells the story of a different character or locale—human, animal, vegetable, mineral, and spirit. Some of the Times are interrelated, as in the case of the Niebieski family; some closely peripheral, like that of Cornspike, a witch-healer who lives in the forest with her daughter Ruta; and some emerge only once, such as the Time of Kurt, a German officer stationed to Primeval during the occupation.
The cast of characters is sundry and, for a 280-page book, vast. (There are 78 Times in the novel and dozens of characters. The Virgin Mary, God, and the great mushroom spawn under the forest of Wodenica all make an appearance.) The narrative coheres in part due to the rhythmic quality of its short chapters, but there is also a vaguely allegorical quality at work. Certainly the novel’s characters see meaning everywhere: “God sees/Time escapes/Death pursues/Eternity waits,” reads a plaque on a neighboring town’s cemetery wall, and much of the novel’s action seems to fall under one of these four headings. In this sense, Primeval is a kind of “tale,” with its emphasis on structure, repetition, and archetype, where collective tradition (in this case, Central European Judeo-Christianity) provides the gloss to aspects of the text left unwritten. Characters move in and out, some appearing only briefly, and yet we are meant to—and do—see them as full, round beings, with sensible motivations and unique psychologies.
As we do in life, Tokarczuk’s characters try to solve the problem of their existence by analyzing the signs and symbols available to them, and Jung—whom Tokarczuk, a former therapist, names as an inspiration—is never far away. So one character, Rachel Szenbert, an innocent Jew from Jeszkotle, is shot with her baby while trying to escape the Germans; another, the aristocrat Squire Popielski goes mad. Captain Gropius, Kurt’s senior officer, speaks as a Nazi would. (“Look at them, Kurt, they’re not so bad after all. I even like the Slavs. Do you know that the name of this race comes from the Latin word sclavus, a servant? This is a nation with servility in its blood . . ..”) These are not Ur-characters exactly, but each draws on some aspect of type.
Then there is Primeval: protozoic, foundational, “the place at the centre of the universe.” An archetypal Polish town perhaps, with its “copses, meadows, and common land,” but also a place to be found on a map, hazily, somewhere near Jeszkotle, south of Wrocław (Breslau), between Strzelin and Grodków on the border between Upper and Lower Silesia—a long-contested land, now Bohemian, now Austrian, Polish, Prussian, Polish again. An imaginary-yet-real place, and both tendencies are alive in Tokarczuk’s novel, infusing the writing with the tension of real life. Are the dandelions and eiderdowns and jam jars of Primeval real or symbolic? Is Katyn an accursed place or just a forest? We live and die, perhaps wrongly, according to narratives of our and others’ creation, yet it can be crushing, maddening to fasten to a vision of a world unimproved by myth or religion, one where “cold and sorrow” reign everywhere.
Though the span of Primeval and Other Times is epic, as are the struggles of its characters, the book feels rather like a nativity calendar: each flap opens to reveal a small story etched into the larger one. Ruta emigrates to Brazil; Izydor, who loves her, retires to his attic to contemplate God (or, in his genderless formulation, Ogod).The mushroom spawn under the forest of Wodenica continues, pale and deathless. The book’s many Times illuminate Primeval’s story, certainly—and Poland’s, that trampled-over country—but also ours, writ large. Murders, miscarriages, illicit love, runaways, torture, crazy aristocrats, war, genocide, and Communism all have their moment, but so do the minute arrangements of village life of the last century: children play under the kitchen table, villagers dump their unwanted dogs under the crazy lady’s hydrangeas, “In the Trenches of Manchuria” is played on a summer evening, and each drama, large or small, is knotted up and unraveled without prejudice or sentimentality.
Tokarczuk (and Lloyd-Jones, in her gorgeously paced, careful translation) writes plainly, knows the names of things around her, the trees and the flowers and the mushrooms, and most miraculously, is not chary of laying claim to objective states of being. Sometimes it seems that she is gently instructing us in a bit of folk wisdom or Jungian dogma. (Angels are “loving sympathy” embodied; the Bad Man crawls on all fours, has sharp white teeth.) Sometimes it feels that she is drawing back the mist that shrouds the world, so that we can at last understand it.
Happily, the forces of chaos, obliteration, and meaninglessness resound in Tokarczuk’s prose; as does simple, destabilizing irony. Ivan Mukta, a “young, slant-eyed” Russian officer, along with his soldiers, takes up residence in Misia Boska’s house during the war. Like Magic Mountain’s Pribislav Hippe with his “Kirghiz eyes” who sets a young Hans Castorp into confusion, both existential and sexual, Mukta is the Other who challenges Izydor Niebieski—a solitary, “special” boy—to imagine a world without God, with nothing “. . . as you say, underneath.” In an astonishing scene, Ivan Mukta copulates with a goat to teach a young Izydor about the birds and the bees. Here is how everything “fits together,” Mukta’s actions seem to say, mocking the mythmaking impulses of character, reader, and author all at once.
In the book’s final chapter, Misia Boska’s eldest daughter, Adelka—we have met her previously, though briefly—comes home from the city after many years, bearing chocolates and eau de cologne for her Uncle Izydor and a shirt and tie for her father. She finds Izydor dead, “the open spaces . . . inside him” rolled up, and her father, Paweł Boski, a former regional health inspector and Party man, sitting amidst the rubble of his former life, unafraid, at last, to die. Paweł makes it understood that he does not want his daughter to linger, and so Adelka takes her mother’s cherished coffee mill—itself stolen from somewhere in Russia by her grandfather during the first World War—turns around and boards the bus back to Kielce. The highway has been paved and the lime trees, those sentinels of eternity, look smaller. She is the only passenger, the mill the one lasting, continuous, material reminder of a village that might never have existed.
"Perhaps the grinder is a splinter off some total, fundamental law of transformation, a law without which this world could not go round or would be completely different,” Tokarczuk tenders early in the book. “Perhaps coffee grinders are the axis of reality, around which everything turns and unwinds, perhaps they are more important for the world than people. And perhaps Misia’s one single grinder is the pillar of what is called Primeval."
A strange image, nearly absurd in its symbolism, though in this glorious book such a claim strikes us as reasonable, even enlightening. There is the sense that this wholly twenty-first-century writer with her dreadlocks (her author photo is disarmingly ageless) has gone to a village she loves, observed its delicate machinery over years, and pried out of the teeth of its history something like observable truth—or at least a manifold version of it. She’s reckoned with our “abaissement du niveau mental,” investigated its origins, followed its conclusions, and witnessed, with loving sympathy, our desperate desire to make sense of things. The discernment is what matters. “If you take a close look at an object,” Tokarczuk writes, “with your eyes closed to avoid being deceived by the appearances that things exude around themselves, if you allow yourself to be mistrustful, you can see their true faces, at least for a moment.”
So Adelka begins to turn the handle of the mill, and the bus driver, surprised, looks at her in the rearview mirror. This is the last action of the novel and it leaves us wondering what this final gesture in a novel quite plush with symbolism might contain. (Is it meant seriously or is she playing? We can’t quite decide.) Though two of Tokarczuk’s short stories have been published on this Web site, only one of her other nine volumes of stories, poems, novellas, and essays have been translated into English, the novel House of Day, House of Night. Perhaps the surprise is something like ours in discovering this book. We can only hope for more.
MAY 18, 2010KINNA
House of Day, House of Night – Olga Tokarczuk
House of Day, House of Night (1998) is set in the fictional small town of Nowa Ruda in Silesia, a region in south-west Poland with sections in the Czech Republic and Germany. It was part of Germany until after World War II when the bulk of the region was transferred back to Poland. The unique history of the region is an integral part of the novel. House of Day, House of Night is not really a novel in the traditional sense. It is a collection of related short narratives, interspersed with vignettes on rural life and villages, biographies of saints, recipes and other observations. Taken together, the collection describes the people, the life and the history of Nowa Ruda.
Many characters populate this book. There is the narrator, who lives with her husband R on their small-scale farm. She collects and analyses dreams.
If you do it regularly, if you carefully read dozens – hundred , even – of other people’s dreams every morning, it’s easy to start seeing the similarities between them… There are nights when everyone seems to dream of running away, nights of war, night of babies being born, nights of dubious love-making….. Each morning you could string these dreams together like beads and end up with a unique and beautiful necklace. Based on the most frequently recurring motifs, you could give the nights tiles, ‘The night of feeding the weak and infirm, ‘The night things fell from the sky…’The night precious things got lost’. Maybe you could name the days after the previous night’s dreams.
And there are sections of the book titled after these dreams! Other characters include the wise and old Marta; the drunk Marek Marek; Krysia who goes in search of quite literally the man in her dreams. There are Germans who return home to Nowa Ruda to die. There are numerous mushroom recipes and an entire biography of the medieval saint Kummernis. There are quasi-essay observations on rhubarbs, comets, and nails. The list goes on and on. Surrealism, magic-realism, simple prose are all utilized in the telling of various stories. There are heartbreaking and tragic moments, comic vignettes and the occasionally wisecrack from Marta. This book has virtually no plot. But the author, Olga Tokarczuk, quite inventively fashions out a portrait of a people and their town. House of Day, House of Night is a unique, original and a very well-written book. It is translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and was shortlisted for the 2004 IMPAC Award.
Yet, in spite of all of the above, I did not emotionally connect with the book. And at first I was puzzled by this. This book, on paper, has all the elements and requirements of a literary read that should appeal to me. I’ve written previously about my love for perfumes. House of Day, House of Night is my Chanel No.5 of books. I appreciate how original and magnificent a creation it is. I admire the perfume when it’s on others but it just doesn’t work with my chemistry. I feel the same way about this book. And therefore I do recommend the book.
I’m a fan of eastern and central European literature. However, I’m more familiar with the poets, especially Milosz and Symborska, of Poland. So I’m very glad to have come across Olga Tokarczuk. Born in 1962, she is one of the most successful writers of her generation and has won numerous awards both in and outside Poland. Another book of hers, Primeval and Other Times, was translated and published this year and I intend to read that as well.
The Observer Books
Poles apart
Olga Torkarczuk claims her place among the greats of Polish letters with House of Day, House of Night
Philip Marsden
Sun 20 Oct 2002 10.40 EDT First published on Sun 20 Oct 2002 10.40 EDT
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House of day of House of night
Buy House of Day, House of Night at Amazon.co.uk
House of Day, House of Night
by Olga Torkarczuk
translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Granta £12, pp256
What other nation can boast two living Nobel laureates - Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz - and, in the late Zbigniew Herbert, a poet at least their equal? Add to these Ryszard Kapuscinski, Slawomir Mrozek and Pawel Huelle and the debt we owe to Polish letters becomes clear. It's a distinctive list that draws on a powerful collective faith and an irony that often seems the only sane approach to the cruel joke of Polish history.
With House of Day, House of Night, her first full-length work here, Olga Tokarczuk can rightfully take her place among these writers. It is not so much a novel as a collection of linked short narratives, found stories, hagiography and incidental observations and is a delight to read - wonderfully inventive and by turns comic, tragic and wise.
The narrator arrives to live with her husband, R, in a small village in the west of Poland. In no particular order she pieces together the stories of the local community and the wider history that informs them.
This being Poland, the village's history is by no means straightforward. It is just yards from the Czech border. Villagers can hear Czech discos; are watched by Czech border guards; the short cut into town takes them through Czech territory. But the people are not indigenous. They are Poles who, after the war, left the old Polish lands of the east - the newly Sovietised territories of Belorussia and Lithuania - and took up residence in the west, occupying houses that had just been vacated by Germans fleeing to the new borders of post-Nazi Germany.
These absent Germans make up one of the many recurring motifs of the book. Their hastily buried chattels are frequently dug up in the forest or the fields; as frail visitors they keep turning up to see their native land again before they die (in one case, as they die).
Tokarczuk's most successful sections are the quick, invariably unhappy portraits that help make up the local mythology. Marek Marek was a drunk who discovered he had shared his body with a terrified bird; after a few botched attempts, he hangs himself. Franz Frost had nightmares transmitted to him from a newly-discovered planet; to protect himself he carved a hat from ash wood; come the war, he refused to swap the hat for a helmet and was killed. His son died from eating a poisoned mushroom and the story of the Frosts ends, as do several others, with a recipe for preparing supposedly toxic amanitas.
If this sounds fanciful, it is not. Tokarczuk's prose is simple and unadorned. She tells her stories with a natural fluency that easily accommodates the hopes, drudgery and absurdities of the world she is describing. Real lives mingle with the imagined, dreams with day, past with present in an entirely plausible way. A lot of nasty things happen and many people die but the tone is by no means gloomy in tone. As Marta, the voice of folk wisdom in the book, points out: 'If death were nothing but bad, people would stop dying immediately.' House of Day, House of Night opens its doors on a very fresh and vibrant Polish talent.
House of Day, House of Night
OLGA TOKARCZUK
The English translation of the prize-winning international bestseller
Winner of the Gunter Grass Prize
Nowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, an area that has been a part of Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia in the past. When the narrator moves into the area, she discovers everyone--and everything--has a story. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda from the its founding to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins the radio quiz every day to the man who causes international tension when he dies straddling the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Each of the stories represents a brick and they interlock to reveal the immense monument that is the town. What emerges is the message that the history of any place--no matter how humble--is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one's self and one's dreams but also with all of the universe.
Richly imagined, weaving anecdote with recipes and gossip, Tokarczuk's novel is an epic of a small place. Since its publication in 1998 it has remained a bestseller in Poland. House of Day, House of Night is the English-language debut of one of Europe's best young writers.
Complex Harmonies: On Olga Tokarczuk’s “Flights”
By Eileen Battersby
171 0 0
APRIL 11, 2018
A GRIEVING DAUGHTER pens three carefully diffident, if increasingly determined, letters to an emperor, pleading for the return of her father’s body. While Antigone demanded her brother’s mangled corpse from a king, this woman is different. Her father, an “esteemed” courtier and diplomat, had not died violently — yet he too had been dishonored after his death, in a curious way. In life he had served the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, who had created a personal cabinet of curiosities in Vienna. Now both men are dead and Josefine Soliman writes to Emperor Francis I of Austria, who had decided to have the “black-skinned” Angelo Soliman, born “around 1720 in North Africa,” an erstwhile acquaintance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, stuffed after his death and put on display, “wearing only a grass band.”
That daughter’s righteous demand is reflected by the loyalty later demonstrated by a sister, who straps the jar containing her dead brother’s heart to her leg and conceals it beneath her skirt to evade Russian border guards. Ludwika’s brother was the great composer Fryderyk Chopin, and following his death in Paris in 1849, she sets out to fulfill his wish and bring the most precious part of him back to his beloved Poland. Centuries earlier, an equally loyal pupil searches for his dead master’s preserved leg — which had been amputated years ago — in order to complete the master’s burial. Elsewhere, a present-day mother of a seriously ill son attempts to flee her grim daily life in a Moscow apartment bloc. While for a young Polish husband and father of one, a vacation on a Croatian island ends in a nightmare and possible madness.
Such are the fragments of lived lives, transformed through imagination, that form the rich sequence of anecdote, observation, wry aside, personal reflection, extended narrative, and intense speculation about the shape of our world and its future one finds in Flights, a sui generis novel by Polish maverick Olga Tokarczuk, longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
Tokarczuk is one of Europe’s most daring and original writers, and this astonishing performance is her glittering, bravura entry in the literature of ideas. The theme is flight, in all its manifestations. Tokarczuk sees the traveler as an individual on a quest for understanding and true experience, perhaps the ultimate in existence, but also potentially driven by the desire to evade reality, elude the inevitable. In a sequence entitled “Everywhere and Nowhere,” she explains:
Whenever I set off on any sort of journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am. At the point I departed from? Or at the point I’m headed to? Can there be an in-between? Am I like that lost day when you fly east, and that regained night that comes from going west? Am I subject to that much-lauded law of quantum physics that states that a particle may exist in two places at once? […] I think there are a lot of people like me. Who aren’t around, who’ve disappeared. They show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigrations officers stamp their passport, or when the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their key. By now they must have become aware of their own instability and dependence upon places, times of day, on language or on a city and its atmosphere. Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness — these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized. Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.
Very early in this wise, observant, and whimsical book, it becomes clear that the reader has found the ideal travel companion, who takes “a different view of time,” and makes one feel that “time is a lot of times in one, quite a wide array.” Indeed, Flights is a narrative to accompany one’s life — each new reading reveals a further destination, another idea to excite and engage the imagination.
To date, Tokarczuk has written two volumes of short stories and eight novels, which include House of Day, House of Night (Dom dzienny, dom nocny, 1998; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2002). That earlier work also moves between the past and the present, truth and myth, as it tells the many stories of the locals living in a small town that’s now Polish, but had been considered German, Czech, and Austro-Hungarian in past times. Yet Flights (Bieguni, 2008; translated by Jennifer Croft in 2017) soars higher. It marks an ambitious stylistic shift in her trajectory, and although she has been compared, inevitably, with the German visionary W. G. Sebald — with whom she does indeed have much in common — her approach is far closer to that of the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai. Like Krasznahorkai, Tokarczuk shapes seemingly disparate stories and then, through sleight of hand, identifies their relevance in a wider context. Each narrative, powerful in its own right, acquires further meaning as the journey continues.
Flights shifts and shimmers. Its obsessive characters speak in captivating, distinct voices. A recent widow makes candid confessions to the creepy doctor intent on acquiring her husband’s research project into dead bodies. The distraught Russian mother mentioned above, Annushka, seeks out the bizarre figure who stands at the entrance to the underground, “the strip of untamed land between the wall and the just-lain pavement blocks.” The female stranger is different, standing apart and dressed in many layers of clothing. Her head is also tightly wrapped, her face hidden: “all you can see is her mouth as it emits a ceaseless stream of curses.”
Such scenes bring to mind Samuel Beckett. Like him, Tokarczuk is as witty as she is intense, as playful as she is cerebral. Literary references abound. She certainly brings out the best in a reader — and demands a great deal of a translator. Jennifer Croft’s rendition is magnificently nimble and subtle. She traverses the contrasting verbal and historical registers and shifting tenses with a grace and ingenuity. The text is resoundingly alive.
Flights possesses an allure comparable to that of Mathias Énard’s Compass (Boussole, 2015; translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell in 2017). Both Énard and Tokarczuk are erudite without being pedantic. But while Énard’s heady confection of story and literary allusion remained bound to Franz Ritter — his insomniac narrator, ill or possibly dying in his Vienna apartment — Tokarczuk riskily favors intermittent bulletins, including a hilarious sequence featuring marathon train journeys devised to cater to reluctant air passengers.
And yet, at the center of it all remains Annushka, who needs to run to a church not to pray but to weep. Although she initially fears that she “might even hear her own name” in “the rush of [the screaming stranger’s] furious words,” what she finds instead is fleeting camaraderie. Like Annushka, the woman is a wanderer, eventually identified by the police as a member of a sect called “Bieguni” — the runners — whose mission to remain in motion is the metaphysical engine of this book. Such is the nature of Tokarczuk’s literary universe, where seemingly random elements are made to resonate in complex harmonies.
Do these harmonies offer resolution? Several characters demonstrate little interest in the living; instead, they are intent on preserving dead bodies, while souls are best to be discarded. One might think that Tokarczuk herself sees survival only in movement, in the current of air that animates us. Yet her achievement rests not in any concrete answers or prescriptions, but in the questions she raises. Chopin’s brave and loyal sister emerges as a heroine for sure, as does the distraught Josefine, whose letters requesting the return of her father’s body are among the most beautiful episodes in the novel. That said, equally sympathetic is the cool, deliberate woman who travels across the world to assist a former lover wishing to be released from his dying body.
A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them. No two readers will experience it exactly the same way. Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited. Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it reflects, challenges, and rewards.
Book of the day Fiction in translation
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk review – the ways of wanderers
A wandering Slavic sect survives on the kindness of strangers in this playful Polish novel
Kapka Kassabova
Sat 3 Jun 2017 02.30 EDT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.42 EST
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Olga Tokarczuk, a household name in Poland.
Olga Tokarczuk, a household name in Poland. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian
One of the fragment-chapters in this fascinating novel of fragments tells of a man who takes a particular book on his travels: a short one by the French-Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran. He feels that European hotels would do well to replace the obligatory Bible with Cioran, because the Bible was no use “for the purposes of predicting the future”. The narrator, an alterego of the author and a good-humoured, reliable voice that carries the novel through its many digressions, meets him on one of her countless peregrinations, and he quotes Cioran at her: “It was clear to me that our mission was to graze the dust in search of a mystery stripped of anything serious.”
This reflects the existential preoccupations of Flights, whose central recurring tropes are physical movement, the mortal body and the meaning of home. It is a novel of intuitions as much as ideas, a cacophony of voices and stories seemingly unconnected across time and space, which meander between the profound and the facetious, the mysterious and the ordinary, and whose true register remains one of glorious ambiguity. Olga Tokarczuk is a household name in Poland and one of Europe’s major humanist writers, working here in the continental tradition of the “thinking” or essayistic novel. Flights has echoes of WG Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić, but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own.
I first read this novel in Bulgarian translation, where the original Polish title has been kept: Bieguni. This word is the key to the book, much more so than the freely rendered “Flights”, a bland but understandable choice in the mostly smooth translation of Jennifer Croft. The bieguni, or wanderers, are an obscure and possibly fictional Slavic sect who have rejected settled life for an existence of constant movement, in the tradition of the travelling yogi, wandering dervishes or itinerant Buddhist monks who survive on the kindness of strangers.
The beiguni have rejected settled life for an existence of constant movement, in the tradition of itinerant Buddhist monks.
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The beiguni have rejected settled life for an existence of constant movement, in the tradition of itinerant Buddhist monks. Photograph: Rungroj Yongrit/EPA
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These wanderers appear halfway through Flights; a desperate woman in an unnamed Russian city meets a seemingly crazy “shrouded” woman who shows her that there is an escape from her life of suffering. The shrouded woman is one of the bieguni, and her monologue provides the most powerful voice of the novel: “Whoever pauses will be petrified, whoever stops, pinned like an insect, his heart pierced by a wooden needle, his hands and feet drilled through and pinned into the threshold and the ceiling … This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads – this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free people to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.”
For the narrator, the obsession with wilful deracination begins in childhood, with her conformist parents and their “timid tourism” every year in the family Škoda. Though away from home, they remained “within the same metaphysical orbit of home … They left in order to return.” The narrator, by contrast, develops an attraction to all things broken, unfinished, incomplete and peripheral: “anything that deviates from the norm, that is … overgrown or incomplete, monstrous and disgusting”.
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And so she takes us to creepy basement museums where anatomical pathologies are preserved in jars; to lurid exhibitions of skinned human bodies; and deep into the minds and bodies of characters real and imagined, sometimes both. Historical figures are unexpectedly imagined: the dead Chopin’s heart, accompanied on its long journey back to Poland by his loving sister Ludwika; an imagined biography of the Flemish surgeon who identified the achilles tendon. The more obviously fictional stories are no less fascinating – the poignant, thrillerish marital drama of Kunicki and his family, who disappear on a Croatian island; the portrait of the Mengele-like Dr Blau, who loves to cut up bodies; the disturbing one-sided correspondence to the Austrian emperor by a woman whose father, a former courtier and diplomat, was posthumously stuffed on account of being black. After a chance encounter with a woman whose mission is to write “a book of infamy” by cataloguing all of humanity’s cruelties, the narrator thinks of Atatürk, whose social reforms included exiling Istanbul’s wild dogs to barren islands, condemning them to devour each other.
Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness, for the acceptance of “fluidity, mobility, illusoriness”. After all, Tokarczuk reminds us, “Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.” Hotels on the continent would do well to have a copy of Flights on the bedside table. I can think of no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times.
• Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova is published by Granta. Flights is published by Fitzcarraldo. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com.