Myth and Supposition
Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, House of Day, House of Night
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 337pp, £13.99, ISBN 9781804271919
reviewed by Jemima Skala
There is a necessary asynchrony to reading Olga Tokarczuk in English translation, an author with so many Polish-language novels in her back pocket, many of which have taken years to come to anglophone shelves. Readers who access her in her original language will have built a more chronological picture of her oeuvre over time; they will, perhaps, possess a knowledge of patterns, tropes, and recurring imagery as it has built on the strength of one novel to the next — her fascination with astrology and the night sky from Flights to Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, or her piecing together of alternative histories as in The Books of Jacob. This is something which an audience in translation must piece together based, for a while at least, on limited resources, while we wait for books to be translated in a manner that doesn’t match the timeline of Tokarczuk’s Polish career.
House of Day, House of Night has a distinctively circuitous English publishing history. Originally published in Poland in 1998, Tokarczuk’s third novel became her first to be translated into English in 2002 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It was published by Granta in an abridged form, perhaps due to the comparative lack of anglophone appetite at the time for literature in translation, which has since boomed in popularity thanks to the introduction of the International Booker prize in 2016, followed by the explosion of BookTok during the pandemic. After winning the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, her astrological-existential noir thriller Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead shot to popularity partly because it is the most accessible Olga Tokarczuk book for English-speaking readers. Relatively short, with a clear narrative voice and style, a recognisable noir form and structure, it’s an accessible entry point into her idiosyncratic style, which is as concerned with the details of organic subjects ranging from mites and mushrooms as it is with the grand religious narratives of medieval saints or the migration of Poles displaced after German occupation in World War Two. Fitzcarraldo Editions, who have established themselves as her English home, is has now published House of Day, House of Night in English in its full original form for the first time in a new translation by Lloyd-Jones.
Set in the small village of Nowa Ruda near the Czech border, a nameless young woman gathers the stories, folktales, dreams, recipes and fears of its inhabitants. Over the course of the book’s pages, a cosmic history of a place emerges, spanning decades and generations, always returning to the narrator, her partner R., and her elderly neighbour Marta; together they forage for mushrooms, shelter from relentless rain, pickle vegetables, prepare meals and just sit together for full afternoons.
In House of Day, House of Night, Tokarczuk uses the same god’s-eye-view that she would later develop and employ to dizzying and often baffling effect in Flights, albeit with more clarity and coherence than in this later work. Still, the meandering sense of possibility that Flights aspires to is present in abundance. It also has a compelling sense of a rooted place and time that makes it feel like a building block for the evocative pastoral noir of Drive Your Plow, which has a similar setting near the Czech border. Marta’s eclecticism and eccentricity could equally be drawn from Hungarian novelist Magda Szabo’s character Emerance, from her 1987 book The Door — a housekeeper who keeps her own work and time and decides exactly how and when and for whom she will work. Similarly, Marta is a wigmaker and takes on ‘five or six a year, almost always to order’. She holds opinions that could also easily be attributed to the mercurial Emerance: ‘she doesn’t like dyed hair, especially bleached hair. She says that colouring stops the hair from being a storeroom for the thoughts.’ But where Emerance is tetchy and unpredictable, Marta is companionable, a guide to the narrator through the quiet changes of rural life, though essentially unknowable. She goes quiet often, and the narrator is left to fill in the gaps.
The story itself is told in episodes, some very short — just a paragraph or a few lines— and others much longer. Memorable ones include Tokarczuk’s own riffing on the story of Saint Solicitous, also known as Kummernis, the Catholic saint so devoted to her religion that she defied her father and stayed in a convent, refusing to marry the suitor he had picked out for her. In Tokarczuk’s telling, she was so devout that she grew a beard, saying, ‘“My Lord has delivered me from myself and has bestowed His face on me.”’ Tokarczuk extends the story by giving a peek into the life of Brother Paschalis, the beautiful monk who wrote Kummernis’ story and who wanted to be a woman. This recurring thread becomes a dizzying medieval romance and, in Tokarczuk’s mythical and non-judgemental tone, a transgender epic. How this relates to the story of Nowa Ruda is obscure until Paschalis is taken in by a gloomy religious sect called the Cutlers who ‘spent their days singing psalms and making knives’; it’s implied in one of the last episodes of the book that the founder of Nowa Ruda is one of their number.
Through myth and supposition as well as piecemeal memories of the family history of various members of the village’s population, Nowa Ruda emerges as a place mired in intersecting histories, a place of dreams and fantasies: a couple are courted separately by the same shapeshifting, Orlando-like figure; the narrator quotes from a website she frequents where strangers all over the world share their dreams anonymously; a local woman chases a stranger to a distant city because she has seen him in her dreams and is convinced that he is her soulmate. The town itself may be small, where the constant patrols of Czech and Polish border guards feel unnecessary and intrusive, but it is worth preserving and writing about. The family histories of the narrator’s neighbours expand from the local to the national and back to the small-scale personal again, as the army marches a train full of displaced people around the country, reallocating houses that used to belong to Germans to Poles. The lingering tragedy of the Second World War is present in these parades of people, in the original German name of the village, in the crowds of German tourists that now, decades later, flock to the village each summer to take photos.
Tokarczuk skilfully navigates these shifts in perspective, often within just a couple of sentences: ‘There was no one in charge — there was no state, and the authorities were only just dreaming themselves up, but they suddenly appeared one night on the platform at a small station where the evacuees had been ordered to disembark. ‘The authorities’ was a man in jackboots whom everyone addressed as ‘Chief’.’ Here, Tokarczuk moves from the general state of Poland’s disarray after occupation to the way in which this is embodied by a single man; the quotes around ‘the authorities’ indicate just how fragile and arbitrary his power is, but also how little this area and its population are taken into regard by the invisible powers overseeing its restoration that they can send a single man to preside over it.
The result is a book that emerges as of a spell: of preservation, but also a conjuring of memories that have been lost or deliberately forgotten. House of Day, House of Night poses a different way of collecting histories, one rooted in feeling and legends rather than documents and fact. Tokarczuk demonstrates these alternative ways of knowing and recording as just as important, just as compelling, as what factual journalism or supposedly straightforward historical accounts have to offer — an entrancing, dizzying vision of a place forgotten by history but indelibly marked by it.
House of Day, House of Night has a distinctively circuitous English publishing history. Originally published in Poland in 1998, Tokarczuk’s third novel became her first to be translated into English in 2002 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It was published by Granta in an abridged form, perhaps due to the comparative lack of anglophone appetite at the time for literature in translation, which has since boomed in popularity thanks to the introduction of the International Booker prize in 2016, followed by the explosion of BookTok during the pandemic. After winning the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, her astrological-existential noir thriller Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead shot to popularity partly because it is the most accessible Olga Tokarczuk book for English-speaking readers. Relatively short, with a clear narrative voice and style, a recognisable noir form and structure, it’s an accessible entry point into her idiosyncratic style, which is as concerned with the details of organic subjects ranging from mites and mushrooms as it is with the grand religious narratives of medieval saints or the migration of Poles displaced after German occupation in World War Two. Fitzcarraldo Editions, who have established themselves as her English home, is has now published House of Day, House of Night in English in its full original form for the first time in a new translation by Lloyd-Jones.
Set in the small village of Nowa Ruda near the Czech border, a nameless young woman gathers the stories, folktales, dreams, recipes and fears of its inhabitants. Over the course of the book’s pages, a cosmic history of a place emerges, spanning decades and generations, always returning to the narrator, her partner R., and her elderly neighbour Marta; together they forage for mushrooms, shelter from relentless rain, pickle vegetables, prepare meals and just sit together for full afternoons.
In House of Day, House of Night, Tokarczuk uses the same god’s-eye-view that she would later develop and employ to dizzying and often baffling effect in Flights, albeit with more clarity and coherence than in this later work. Still, the meandering sense of possibility that Flights aspires to is present in abundance. It also has a compelling sense of a rooted place and time that makes it feel like a building block for the evocative pastoral noir of Drive Your Plow, which has a similar setting near the Czech border. Marta’s eclecticism and eccentricity could equally be drawn from Hungarian novelist Magda Szabo’s character Emerance, from her 1987 book The Door — a housekeeper who keeps her own work and time and decides exactly how and when and for whom she will work. Similarly, Marta is a wigmaker and takes on ‘five or six a year, almost always to order’. She holds opinions that could also easily be attributed to the mercurial Emerance: ‘she doesn’t like dyed hair, especially bleached hair. She says that colouring stops the hair from being a storeroom for the thoughts.’ But where Emerance is tetchy and unpredictable, Marta is companionable, a guide to the narrator through the quiet changes of rural life, though essentially unknowable. She goes quiet often, and the narrator is left to fill in the gaps.
The story itself is told in episodes, some very short — just a paragraph or a few lines— and others much longer. Memorable ones include Tokarczuk’s own riffing on the story of Saint Solicitous, also known as Kummernis, the Catholic saint so devoted to her religion that she defied her father and stayed in a convent, refusing to marry the suitor he had picked out for her. In Tokarczuk’s telling, she was so devout that she grew a beard, saying, ‘“My Lord has delivered me from myself and has bestowed His face on me.”’ Tokarczuk extends the story by giving a peek into the life of Brother Paschalis, the beautiful monk who wrote Kummernis’ story and who wanted to be a woman. This recurring thread becomes a dizzying medieval romance and, in Tokarczuk’s mythical and non-judgemental tone, a transgender epic. How this relates to the story of Nowa Ruda is obscure until Paschalis is taken in by a gloomy religious sect called the Cutlers who ‘spent their days singing psalms and making knives’; it’s implied in one of the last episodes of the book that the founder of Nowa Ruda is one of their number.
Through myth and supposition as well as piecemeal memories of the family history of various members of the village’s population, Nowa Ruda emerges as a place mired in intersecting histories, a place of dreams and fantasies: a couple are courted separately by the same shapeshifting, Orlando-like figure; the narrator quotes from a website she frequents where strangers all over the world share their dreams anonymously; a local woman chases a stranger to a distant city because she has seen him in her dreams and is convinced that he is her soulmate. The town itself may be small, where the constant patrols of Czech and Polish border guards feel unnecessary and intrusive, but it is worth preserving and writing about. The family histories of the narrator’s neighbours expand from the local to the national and back to the small-scale personal again, as the army marches a train full of displaced people around the country, reallocating houses that used to belong to Germans to Poles. The lingering tragedy of the Second World War is present in these parades of people, in the original German name of the village, in the crowds of German tourists that now, decades later, flock to the village each summer to take photos.
Tokarczuk skilfully navigates these shifts in perspective, often within just a couple of sentences: ‘There was no one in charge — there was no state, and the authorities were only just dreaming themselves up, but they suddenly appeared one night on the platform at a small station where the evacuees had been ordered to disembark. ‘The authorities’ was a man in jackboots whom everyone addressed as ‘Chief’.’ Here, Tokarczuk moves from the general state of Poland’s disarray after occupation to the way in which this is embodied by a single man; the quotes around ‘the authorities’ indicate just how fragile and arbitrary his power is, but also how little this area and its population are taken into regard by the invisible powers overseeing its restoration that they can send a single man to preside over it.
The result is a book that emerges as of a spell: of preservation, but also a conjuring of memories that have been lost or deliberately forgotten. House of Day, House of Night poses a different way of collecting histories, one rooted in feeling and legends rather than documents and fact. Tokarczuk demonstrates these alternative ways of knowing and recording as just as important, just as compelling, as what factual journalism or supposedly straightforward historical accounts have to offer — an entrancing, dizzying vision of a place forgotten by history but indelibly marked by it.