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Reviewed by:
  • House of Day, House of Night
  • Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk trans. by Antonia Lloyd-JonesNorthwestern University Press, 2003, 304 pp., $17.95 (paper)

Olga Tokarczuk, the author of four novels and two collections of short stories, has won great critical and popular acclaim in her native Poland. Her books have been translated into most European languages, but the writer is just now making her American debut.

Tokarczuk's novel House of Day, House of Night relies on the poetics of the fragment, which allows the author to range freely through widely various experiences and expand the novel's range. The fragment is well suited to express the underlying convictions of the novel: that life is multifaceted, ambiguous and indefinable; that the boundaries between reality and dream, between day and night, are fluid; that hidden meanings may only be sensed, not grasped.

The book opens with a description of the narrator's dream, which serves as a metaphor for Tokarczuk's novelistic ambition. Positioned above a valley, the narrator dreams that she has become pure seeing, nameless and bodiless, unencumbered by time and space, aware only that "the world below was yielding to me as I looked at it, constantly moving towards me, and then away, so first I could see everything, then only tiny details."

And the novel does just that: it presents a mosaic of stories, comments, notes, each embedded in the framing narrative. What link these different segments together are the persona of the narrator and the setting. The narrator lives part of the year in a village in Lower Silesia in the Sudeten Mountains, and her narrative perspective is organically connected to this mountain region.

The framing narrative recounts the narrator's encounters with Marta, an enigmatic old neighbor and sage who stays attuned to the seasonal cycles and moves to the rhythm of nature. The narrator has to "create" Marta as she creates her book: by trying to fit together disparate bits and pieces, even though she knows all too well that her efforts are doomed. Marta refuses to cohere into a predictable whole and will forever remain a puzzle. The women perform ordinary tasks—washing dishes, shredding cabbage, drinking tea, shopping—but as with everything else in Tokarczuk's novel, even such everyday activities hint at the larger mysteries of life.

All stories within the book in one way or another deal with change, transformation and the hidden dimensions of existence. The characters in them, Polish and German, [End Page 185] come from different time periods but are connected to the same place. They sense that their existence borders on other worlds, beyond the visible, the mundane and the rational. They often see things in double vision and are aware of the precarious and uncertain parameters of the self. The suicide, Marek Marek, believes that a huge bird inhabits his body. The monk, Paschalis, longs to be a woman. Ergo Sum is tormented by his conviction that he turns into a werewolf. A provincial prophet looks for the signs of the end of the world. Krysia, an employee of a local bank, searches for a lover whose voice she heard as a whisper in her left ear. Kummernis, a saintly and beautiful woman, wakes up with Christ's face instead of her own.

House of Day, House of Night takes the reader on an imaginative journey within and beyond the confines of everyday life. It also announces the arrival, in English, of an exciting writer from what used to be called "the other Europe."

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