Polish writer, activist and intellectual Olga Tokarczuk has the most fertile imagination, creating a world from the objects of everyday life. In this publication of one of her early novels, she invents a typology for one of her characters. A system of classification where “people are like the ground they live on, whether they like it or not”. People born on sandy soil are dogged, holding belligerently on to life, while those born near water are soft, fragile and sensitive. Those born on rock have hard exteriors but are hollow inside.
Tokarczuk has acquired a huge worldwide following since winning the 2018 Nobel Prize for literature, the same year she also won the International Booker Prize for her novel Flights. She has twice won the Nike Award, Poland’s top literary prize. In 2022, the English translation of The Book of Jacob was published, running to nearly 1000 pages and taking seven years to translate. A long wait is common for English versions of her novels, with House of Day, House of Night first being published in Poland in 1998.
Our guide is an unnamed narrator who describes her life in a small Polish village and her frequent conversations with enigmatic neighbour Marta, an old grey woman of indeterminate age. “For the past three years I have wondered who Marta really is. She has told me many different versions of the facts about herself. Every time, she has given a different birth year … Marta has only ever existed in the summer; in winter she disappears.”
The book is set in Nowa Ruda, the town where Tokarczuk lives in real life but which has a long history of transition, the last time being when it was taken from Germany at the end of World War II and used to resettle Poles who lost their lands to Russia in the East. Late in the book she calls it a “fragment town, a Silesian, Prussian, Czech, Austro-Hungarian and Polish town”. Some of its characteristics include “a place where you change trains”, with “market squares on the outskirts” and “steps that start and finish at the same level”.
This theme of shifting of international boundaries can be found in other Tokarczuk novels, such as Primeval and Other Times and in The Empusium, published last year. In Nowa Ruda, Germans come to visit the places that once belonged to them and some of the new inhabitants make a living from treasure hunting the possessions left behind or buried in the hope of retrieval.
There is much more to the tale than the narrator and Marta, and there are many other stories running among the short chapters. An ancient tale of medieval hagiography concerns a saint known as Kummernis (or Wilgefortis), who when her father took her from a convent in order to marry her off was gifted a beard by God to make her less appealing. In a rage her father killed and crucified her, leading to a cult of paintings of a young woman with a bearded face hung from the cross. Reality, folklore and fiction mingle on the page. The book includes the full story of the saint written by a young monk, and then later the story of the monk himself and how he came to write the history, and finally translations of the writings of the saint. All this is woven into descriptions of local floods, the monster that villagers found in the pond and Marta’s superstitions about the real hair she uses to make wigs for others.
There is plenty of talk of mushrooms and mushroom collecting, as well as the inclusion of at least five detailed recipes that include such dubious species as lurid boletes and puffballs. One passage warns of the similarity of a dangerous mushroom: “The death cap of the meadows. It smells sweet and watches the herd of meadow mushrooms from afar, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” The narrator, however, seems impervious to poisonous varieties, tasting them with her tongue. She even goes so far as to say that, “If I was not a person I would be a mushroom. An indifferent, insensitive mushroom with a cold slimy skin, hard and soft all at once.”
Tokarczuk has described this as a “constellation” novel. It is certainly a treat for the sheer number of flights of imagination and the creation of a small community of fascinating characters whose range of names such as Ergo Sum, Bobol, So-and-So and Marek Marek all add to the mystery and leave the reader looking for the recognisable patterns that might make up a constellation that they recognise or can put a name to.
House of Day, House of Night, by Olga Tokarczuk (Text Publishing, $39.99), is out now.
