House of Day, House of Night
Polish fiction
Original title – Dom dzienny, dom nocny
Translator – Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Source = Subscription book
Well, with the Nobel due tomorrow. I happened to read this book recently; it is an earlier book from the Polish Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk. Fitzcarraldo recently reissued it. I have had a mixed relationship with her books. I was looking forward to The Book of Jacob, but I struggled to get through it and felt it would take a rereading to fully understand. I loved Flights when I read it, and I also loved Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead. For me, this novel, which came before both of those books, is a little bit style-wise like Flights, as Olga calls her constellation novels, which is a similar style she uses for Flights, but it also feels familiar in place to the setting of Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead.
Between twelve and one a nice woman’s voice reads a serialized novel. It’s impossible not to listen to it; we all have to listen to every single novel because it’s on when we’re preparing dinner, when we’re peeling potatoes or making pierogi. Throughout April it was Anna Karenina.
He loves another woman, that is clearer still,” she said to herself as she entered her own room. “I want love, and it is lacking. So everything is finished! And it must be finished. But how?” she asked herself, and sat down in the armchair before the looking glass.’
Sometimes Marta comes over at noon and automatically starts helping with something, such as dicing the carrots.
She listens quietly and solemnly, but she never says anything – about Anna Karenina or any other novel we’ve heard read on the radio.
I loved the thought of local radio reading Tolstoy
I said this is like Drive Your Plough, as it is set in the remote Polish countryside; this time it is a village, and those who do live there form a chorus of voices telling the village’s story. We see the place Olga actually lives in: a village at the crossroads of Poland, Czechia, and Germany. The book sees all these nationalities in the village. Our narrator carries the narrative; she has just moved to the village of Nowa Ruda in the Silesia area of Poland. Her neighbour Marta is one of the women who have shaped the village, and through her we hear the village’s stories retold. From the local drunk to folktales about deaths from mushrooms, to a dead boy straddling the border. A cacophony of tales builds a rich place scarred by the various countries that have ruled the village over the centuries.
THE GERMANS
Early this summer the Germans began to appear in the meadows. Their grizzled heads came floating by on a sea of grass, and their wire-rimmed glasses glittered gaily in the sunshine. So-and-So said that you can recognize Germans by their shoes, which are clean and white.
We don’t take care of our shoes, we don’t respect them, they’re clunky and always made of dark leather, or else we wear gumboots, rubber farm boots, into which Stasek Bachleda flicks the ash from his cigarette. Our shoes are made of PVC, garish black-and-white counterfeits of popular brands. They’re permanently muddy because of the sodden red earth, and misshapen from being repeatedly frozen and dried out again.
I smiled at her description of the Germans
As I said, as one of her earliest novels, this may show what followed in her other novels. The constellation style of novel, as she calls it, shows how she used it in Flights to Much Effect. Then the village setting. She used it in Drive You Plough. Anyone who has read this blog for any time knows I love a book set in a village; it has the whole world in a small place. From death to birth. From saints to Transvestite monks, all the world is here. I was reminded of stones in a landslide; as many of you know, one of my all-time favourites: the variety you can see in a small village, but also, at points, the way the voices were almost a chorus reminded me of the Irish novel Cré na cille, the way it captures the voices of the villagers, live and dead. I’m not sure if she had read or was aware of these other books, but it may show how villages can be similar; whether in the mountains of Spain or the middle of Ireland, there are stories, secrets, and all of life there with those living there. Maybe this is the best place to start with Tokarczuk if you’re new to her, since it foreshadows her later work; especially, you can see the draw of the history that must have fueled her to write The Book of Jacob. Have you read this book, and who do you think will win the Nobel Prize in Literature tomorrow?
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