Long before a Swedish furniture manufacturer snaffled the slogan, European popular piety focused on the wonderful everyday. The Lives of the Saints typically told the stories of ordinary people in the grip of the extraordinary. The realist novel, on the other hand, ushering in the modern age, was a prisoner of plausibility – anything that was weird, excessive or otherworldly was gradually relegated to the ghetto of genre fiction (children’s literature, science fiction and fantasy).
Olga Tokarczuk, Polish winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, has been eager over the course of her writing career to retrieve the subversive energies of realism’s orphans: the folktale, the fairy tale and the literature of the wayside pulpit. House of Day, House of Night, whose first English translation came out 2002 with Granta Books, is now published by Fitzcarraldo – in its original structure – in a new translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
It is a mesmerising showcase of Tokarczuk’s skills at blending a scrupulous attentiveness to the most humdrum detail of village life in rural Poland with startling forays into the realms of the uncanny. The novel, which is set in Lower Silesia, a region Tokarczuk later revisits in Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead (2018), blithely ignores the linear, plot-driven conventions of commercial fiction. Instead, she opts for a form of writing which draws the reader in by obsessively circling around certain themes – loss, obsession, enchantment, inconstancy – that gradually take on meaningful shapes in the reader’s consciousness.
The craft equivalent of Tokarczuk’s style is the art of the mosaic, the separate stones of beautifully executed microhistories that are carefully placed to make up larger patterns of significance. There is the tale of Marek Marek, who falls prematurely from grace to engage in an increasingly delirious battle with alcohol. There is the story of Krysia Flaster, who crosses Poland to pursue a voice heard in a dream. There is the account of St Kummernis, whose sacred image combines the body of a woman and the bearded head of the crucified Christ, and whose chronicler, Paschalis, has his own unsettling experience of a conflicted sexual identity.
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Threaded throughout the novel are the exchanges between the narrator and Marta, wigmaker and philosopher queen, who emerges in the spring from a mysterious hibernation. Marta is both unworldly and brutally direct. Tying up bundles of rhubarb, she observes: “Whenever people say ‘everything’, ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘every’, they’re really only talking about themselves – in the real world such generalities do not exist.”
As a wigmaker, she believes that hair gathers a person’s thoughts as it grows, which is why when you want a fresh start, the first thing you do is get your hair cut. The sections in the novel entitled “The Ways Marta Might Die,” “Marta Creates a Typology” (of soil types that determine people’s nature) or “Dahlias” (how Marta’s old age becomes a universal template for ageing) are Tokarczuk’s puckish takes on the more lyrical fringes of thought.
In a novel that explores the multiple possibilities of in-betweenness, and the tragic histories of borders, the choice of Lower Silesia has its own distinct resonance. Annexed by Prussia from Austria in 1742 and integrated into the German empire in 1871, the region would witness in the period after the second World War the forced displacement of its German-speaking inhabitants and their replacement by Poles displaced from regions in the east.
Tokarczuk tracks the many hauntings of the region, the overlapping of personal traumas, and the press ganging of language and placenames into the shifting geographies of occupation and possession. In the section entitled “Peter Dieter,” the Polish novelist captures with great tact the last day of an elderly German who has come back to see the village of his youth. His unexpected death provides the occasion for some black humour as his dead body is discreetly moved back and forth across the Polish-Czech border by guards terrified at the prospect of the paperwork involved in reporting his demise.
As Tokarczuk has repeatedly shown, in her writings and her public pronouncements, she is deeply sceptical of the easy pieties of faith and fatherland and of the drumbeat of violence that grows ever louder to drown out the voices of the dead and the disappeared.
[ Flights by Olga Tokarczuk: Enchanting meditation on metamorphosis and connectionOpens in new window ]
On a visit to the town of Wambierzyce, Marta visits the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a magnificent 18th-century Baroque basilica from 1715-1723, built by Count Franciszek Antoni von Goetzen. Marta spends most of her time looking at the votive icons hanging in the naves, ‘showing all kinds of misfortunes and happy endings’ with ‘dozens of little case histories of illnesses, metamorphoses and conversions.’
In what Tokarczuk herself has called a “constellation-novel”, she has brought together her own galaxy of compelling case histories and the result is unfailingly revealing. Her trusted intermediary, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is the best accomplice Tokarczuk could have wished for in another triumph of the translator’s art.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
