Olga Tokarczuk

[Stewart]

Other than her name, I'm not familiar with Olga Tokarczuk (born 29 January 1962) but Wikipedia tells us that she

is one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful Polish writers of her generation, particularly noted for the hallmark mythical tone of her writing.
​

I've seen a couple of her books around the shops but haven't really picked them up. Here's the detail from the Polish Culture website:

Olga Tokarczuk (born 1962) is the best-selling author of eight novels including Primeval and Other Times, House of Day, House of Night, Final Stories and Runners, which in 2009 won Poland’s top literary prize, the Nike award. She has also written two volumes of short stories, some of which have been published in English in several leading US literary journals. Her books have been translated into many languages worldwide and have also won international prizes. Notably, the English-language edition of House of Day, House of Night (Granta, 2002), was shortlisted for the IMPAC Literary Award.

With the publication in January Primeval and Other Times (by Twisted Spoon), two of Tokarczuk’s novels have now appeared in English translation. This enchanting novel chronicles the twentieth-century history of a mythical Polish village. Living at the heart of Europe in its most turbulent times, the ordinary people of Primeval suffer the misfortunes of history as well as letting their own passions shape their lives. Told in the magical tone of a fairy tale, the story combines mystery and reality in an intriguing way.

House of Day, House of Night (first published in Polish in 1998) returns to the remote Polish countryside, but in the present day. The narrator who has made her home in this place at the heart of Europe tells us of her encounters with the local people and the stories she gathers from them, building a portrait of a mysterious neighbourhood peopled by colourful characters whose seemingly simple lives reach deep into the complexities of human experience.

By contrast, instead of focusing on home as the central point for the novel, Runners is about being constantly on the move. This unconventional novel consists of shorter and longer stories, some involving outward journeys to the furthest corners of the world, and some about inward exploration of the human body. While recurrent themes such as the meaning of place and time, deformity, loss and death echo throughout, the fragmentation of the narrative is also a reflection of the travelling way of life – those who refuse to remain in one place accept that their world consists of a succession of pieces that do not necessarily have continuity or fit together in a logical way.

Tokarczuk’s latest novel to be published in Poland is Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead. Showing her versatility as a writer, here she applies an ironical touch to the crime genre. Returning to the familiar setting of the Polish countryside, she has added an amusing dose of black comedy to the conventional murder story. In this story narrated by an old woman who lives alone in a cottage with her beloved dogs, things turn nasty when a series of mysterious killings appear to have been committed by... animals.

She's doing a mini-tour of the UK, started at the Hay Festival and concluding on Thursday in Glasgow. So I'm heading to this event and will try and report back. What makes it interesting is that it is an event that also includes her translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, so should be interesting both from the point of view of writing and also translating the books.

Has anyone read Tokarczuk here?

 

[Eric]

Good Lord, Stewart, those bally Brits are letting a foreigner into one of their book festivals. A job for MI5. You never can trust those Continental chappies, which is why the Brits have been stuffing the festivals full of the Clintons and Paxmans of this world. Can't quite remember whether John Prescott appeared at one.

Anyway, Tokarczuk. She's a pretty big name around Europe, translated into umpteen languages. So it's nice that the Brits have given her their stamp of approval. When she appeared in Stockholm last autumn to promote her translation there was a fairly large audience, though not as many as for Jeanette Winterson, when she came some while later. I've not yet read Tokarczuk (was looking at Pawel's Huelle's famous novel yesterday instead) but I did get the Swedish translation of one of her books signed by her. I believe she is a phantasmagorical kind of writer, maybe magical-realistish.

I have never met Antonia Lloyd-Jones, but she is in my good books, because she translated some key stories by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, in an anthology called "The Birch Grove and Other Stories". So I'm sure she's done justice to Tokarczuk.

Have a good time in Glasgow.

 

[Stevie B]

This is a new name to me, Stewart. Thanks for pointing her out. I see from your notes that one of her books was published by Twisted Spoon Press. It seems like they are publishing a number of highly-regarded authors in English translation. Nice to see a Prague-based publisher filling the void.

 

[Stevie B]

Eric, your post put a smile on my face. Thanks.

On a separate note, you mentioned a famous novel by Pawel Huelle but didn't name the title. I was thinking of ordering a copy of Castorp. Is that the book you were referring to?

 

[accidie]

Read House of Day, House of Night a year or so ago. It began well, with stories and anecdotes from the history of the village--some of them rather haunting--but these became progressively less interesting. The book as a whole became decidedly uninteresting when author turned her attention to mystical wise etc. old neighbour.

My opinion of the book may have been influenced by reading it shortly after finishing Little Infamies by Karnezis. To some extent that book deals with the same themes, but it does so in a more impersonal and to me much better way.

 

[Eric]

A few supplementary pieces of information about Tokarczuk, the first of which is from the Twisted Spoon Press website, as mentioned earlier by Stewart and Stevie B:

Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[pesahson]

Olga Tokarczuk: born 29 January 1962, a trained psychologist, an author of 12 novels, a book of poetry and some short stories.

1989: Miasta w lustrach
1993: Podróż ludzi księgi. ("The Journey of the Book-People")
1999: E. E
1996: Prawiek i inne czasy ("Primeval and Other Times")
1997: Szafa
1998: Dom dzienny, dom nocny. (House of Day, House of Night)
2000: Lalka i perła.
2001: Gra na wielu bębenkach
2004: Ostatnie historie2006: Anna In w grobowcach świata. ("Anna In in the Tombs of the World")
2007: Bieguni "Runners"
2009: Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych. ("Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead")

More details here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Tokarczuk

Review in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/oct/20/fiction.features2


Some interviews with Olga (found on the page of Twisted Spoon Press):

http://www.polishwriting.net/index.php?id=39
http://www.polishwriting.net/index.php?id=128
http://www.polishwriting.net/index.php?id=129
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/info/?fa=text156

 

[Baudelaire Theorist]

There are two short stories available in English by Olga Tokarczuk for those who are interested to read her, and I hope they are plenty

The Subject, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

In the monograph on his work that he started to read over morning coffee he found a small mistake. It was that his novel, The Open Eyes of Life, was published in ‘82, not ‘84. For some reason, the woman who wrote the monograph had left out the first, uncensored edition that came out abroad. He added a correction in pencil and lit his first cigarette. He only had four left now – he had to limit himself. The doctor had told him that at his age he should give up smoking altogether, but he knew that with no smoking there would be no writing. There was a direct dependency between drawing on cigarette smoke and writing. As it filled his lungs, the smoke seemed to set his memory going, probably because smoke and memory are similar in nature – both consist of transient trails that swirl together into little rings, flourishes and transparent layers that hang in their adopted shape for a brief moment before vanishing for ever. With just a little concentration, it was possible, thanks to some incredible miracle, to transform these ephemera into words and sentences. (...)

The rest of the story can be read here: http://www.polishwriting.net/index.php?id=41

 

[Baudelaire Theorist]

Granta has also a new story online:


Preserves for Life, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

When she died, he gave her a decent funeral. All her friends came, hideous old ladies in berets and winter coats with coypu-fur collars that smelled of mothballs, with their heads sticking out of them like large, pale growths. They started tactfully snivelling as the coffin went down, suspended on rain-soaked ropes; then, huddled into small groups, under the domes of their improbably-patterned folding umbrellas, they headed for their bus stops.

That very evening he opened the cabinet where she kept her documents and searched in there, without knowing what he was looking for. Money. Secret shares. Bonds for a quiet old age, always advertised on television with autumnal scenes full of falling leaves.

All he found were some old insurance booklets from the 1950s and 1960s, a Party membership card belonging to his father, who had They started tactfully snivelling as the coffin went down, suspended on rain-soaked ropes. died in 1980 in the unsullied belief that communism was a metaphysical, eternal order and also his own drawings from nursery school carefully kept in a cardboard folder tied with a rubber band. It was touching that she had kept his drawings – he never would have imagined it. There were also her notebooks full of recipes for pickles, chutneys and jams. Each one started on a separate page, and each one’s name was graced with shy flourishes – a culinary expression of the need for beauty. ‘Pickles with mustard’. ‘Marinated pumpkin à la Diana’. ‘Avignon salad’. ‘Boletus Creole style’. Sometimes there were minor eccentricities: ‘Apple peel jelly’, for instance, or ‘Sweet flag in sugar’. (...)


The rest of the story can be read here: http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Preserves-for-Life

 

[Baudelaire Theorist]

Excerpt from AnnaIn in the catacombs, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (the novel is not available in English yet)

The Descent It is no pleasure to bring news to my mistress. It is no pleasure to stand before her, it is hard to utter a sound. I, Neti, a heap of bones draped in threadbare fibres, I, Everyman the narrator, shudder as I draw near to her. Around her it is always several degrees colder, as I have verified. I have come to know the language of her hissing, electrified hair that she combs malevolently without respite. I have to lower my gaze – my mistress is not a pretty sight.

“A personage has come who claims she is your sister,” I say nonchalantly, trying my best not to imbue my words with any emotion.

The comb stops dead. Briefly, the hair falls silent, but her lips darken, going black as pitch – a bad sign for me.

“How does she look?” I hear her say.

I try hard to remember exactly what I saw a short time ago through a chink in the door. My memory is weak, accustomed to the gloom, to patches of shade – it is wholesale rather than retail. How does she look? It was a pleasant sight, warm, dry and bright. The perfect thing for my rheumatism.

“She is wearing a bizarre cap with horns covering her hair, which is tied into hundreds of little plaits, and a necklace made of sky-blue stones…” – and what else, what else can I think of, poor me. No one dresses up like that here. What else am I to say? I can never tell the difference between a skirt and a frock. “She has some sparkling gems on her breast, and a great ring on her finger, maybe of gold, one hundred percent pure, so large she could kill with it. She has a silver bodice or camisole over a brightly coloured frock.

”I search my mind for suitable words – I am never able to name items of clothing. Frock, skirt, bodice, waistcoat, frock coat, tailcoat… the city folk are endlessly inventive. And yet it would be quite enough for all human clothes to be simply called a “sweater”. “She is holding something like a compass and a pictorial map, and her hands are all covered in tattoos.” After a while I add my own comment: “It’s not very feminine… She has made up her eyes with stylish graphite-grey eyeshadow. A handsome woman, young and healthy,” I say, while thinking this is the beginning of trouble.

I hear the comb start up its motion again, and the hair crackles angrily. But the voice, her voice, is strangely calm: “Go back and let her in, draw back the bolts and let her come in if it matters so much to her.

”Nothing could have surprised me more that that answer of hers. I would sooner have expected a fit of rage, an underground storm, or an earthquake, the scream she emits when she’s in a fury, or her sharp fingernails. In the blinking of an eye, in the batting of an eyelid, I lift my gaze in amazement, but instantly drop it again – it’s not a pleasant sight. Perhaps I misheard?
No, not at all. She clearly repeats: “Let her come in, but tell her to leave her suitcase outside and take off all her necklaces, one after another, and she is to wash off her make-up and take off all that trash. This is not a ball or a fashion parade. She is to stand here naked, the way I know her.”

“Coldly,” is all I say – I prefer that word to any other. It serves me for “yes”. I pass no comment, I never have an opinion. My feet splash in the shallow, cold water and slap against the flagstones that have never seen the sun and have grown mossy with longing for it. Like me. But what do my bones want the sun for? They’re never going to flourish anyway.

I set the gate ajar and a little light falls in from outside. It blinds me. There stands the young lady, waiting. I repeat my mistress’ words to her, precisely, mechanically, I am an automatic porter with aching bones, it’s all the same to me. I have no heart, I have no regret. In my bones there is no sympathy. I won’t get involved in this.

“Was she pleased to hear I had come?” asks Anna In. But I have no intention of answering her. What would I have to say to her? Was she pleased? That’s a good one.

As her foot crosses the threshold, as she slips into the darkness like into a black stocking, for a moment I feel like seizing the girl, twisting her arms and throwing her out of here. And shouting: “Go away! Get lost!” But I can keep my self-control, I’m far on in years. So without really counting on a reply I merely ask: “Do you know what you are doing?”

“Yes, I do,” she says.

I like that. Sometimes such worn out, wilting, fatally weary people come here. They bang on the door so hard they must think this is a sanatorium. There’s a tiny little garret for them here, a sweet little quarantine until they recover. I’ve had quite enough bother. I am an official, I just carry out orders, I’m commissioned to work here for eternity.

“Was she pleased to hear I had come?” the woman asks again, as we move into the depths.

“You are not allowed to say anything here, so forget about words,” I whisper reproachfully. “From now on you are not allowed a single word, and in any case your chatter is of no use here. It’ll be nothing but an echo that bounces off the walls. The words will come back mangled, like war-torn, invalid words. If we could talk as freely here as you do up there, everything would be different.”

I lead the girl down a wide corridor with rusty tracks running along it. We are walking up to our ankles in water, hence my pains. Anna In furtively inspects me, and I can feel her gaze. It is warm, let her look. I am not ashamed of being nothing but a heap of bones gnawed away at by rheumatism and held together by crocheted sweaters. Falling means risking their total disintegration, and so I place my bare feet carefully on the slippery bottom.

At a creaking iron door I tell her to take off her cap and I cast it into the water. She looks better without it anyway. She does want to protest, but holds her tongue at the last moment – it’s all right, she has understood – here nothing is said. Then we go downwards until we reach a half-rotted wooden door. Here I tell her to leave her necklace. I examine it again before casting it into the water, but its value does not show up well here. The stones will soon fade and the strings will rot through. City jewellery! The same goes for those huge shining gems – what light will they reflect, what will make them sparkle? They’re out of place here – my mistress doesn’t like gewgaws. No reds or pinks, and she can’t stand blue. Instead she likes black and grey and khaki. She has an interest in sculpture – she appreciates stalagmites. She likes music, especially the monodic kind that’s based on a single sound and remains monotonous, now softer, now louder, a whole concert for several days, sometimes three months on end. It calms her. She likes one colour of painting – black, and contemplates its shades with an expert eye. No, no baubles. Still far to go? Anna In must surely want to ask. But I won’t answer. What would I have to say to her?

 

[Baudelaire Theorist]

Anyway, Tokarczuk. She's a pretty big name around Europe, translated into umpteen languages. So it's nice that the Brits have given her their stamp of approval.

I need to quote this, beg your pardon Eric. Funny insofar that still are only two of her novels are available in English language, that is "Primeval and other times" and "House of Day, House of Night" and for the former the world-rights in English are held by the Czech publisher Twisted Spoon, based in Prague.

As there is this excerpt from "AnnaIn in the catacombs" I suppose there might be a chance that A. Lloyd-Jones is in the process of translating this one but I cannot vouch for it.

 

[Baudelaire Theorist]

AnnaIn in the catacombs

Olga Tokarczuk has chosen to revive one of the oldest myths, the story of the moon goddess Inana, who descends to the underworld,
ruled by her sister Ereshkigal.

Tokarczuk’s telling of the story takes elements from different versions and uses the peripheral characters, mainly the goddesses’ loyal servants, as narrators. Anna In, as the goddess is renamed, answers the summons of her sinister sister and descends to the underworld, where she is imprisoned as one of the dead. But her loyal servant Nina Shubur appeals to her three Fathers, apparently the most powerful gods, to rescue her. When they refuse to help, Nina Shubur seeks out Anna In’s mother Ninma, a goddess with the power to give life who disagreed with the Fathers’ idea of creating the world and has chosen to live apart from them. She proves mightier than the Fathers, instructing Nina Shubur to tell them that unless her daughter returns from the underworld, she will withhold all the normal processes of life. This threat works, and Anna In is released, but on condition she send a substitute. She returns to earth pursued by demons, and eventually the choice of sacrifice falls on her former lover, the Gardener. Attempting to protect him, his sister offers to go instead of him; in the final outcome they take it in turns to spend half a year each in the underworld. Finally the Fathers celebrate Anna In’s return by endowing her with divine attributes, which she passes on to mankind.

The story is set in a surreal world, where people live in a sky-high futuristic city built on top of the catacombs, the realm of the dead; express lifts go up to the office-like realm of the gods, and down to the dank underworld. Busy as an ant-heap at its urban centre where everything seems focused on rapid results, outside the city there are desolate suburbs, such as the deserted airfield where Ninma nurtures life. The narrative also combines abstraction and realism, using a lyrical style with echoes of classical epic.​

 

[Baudelaire Theorist]

Drive Your Plough Over The Bones Of The Dead

An eccentric woman in her 60s describes the events surrounding a series of local murders in a remote village in south-west Poland.
Finally it becomes clear that she herself is the murderer, driven by revenge for the killing of her pet dogs by local hunters. By no means a conventional crime story, this entertaining novel offers some thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, social injustice against people who are marginalised, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, and belief in predestination. In recent years the crime novel has emerged as a new genre in Polish literature. Here a novelist of a more sophisticated kind uses the genre for her own purposes to produce a very readable book.

But the crime story, which is well constructed and does offer the reader a bit of a mild puzzle (most of the victims are shady characters whose murders are no great surprise), is just an excuse for some more subtle aims. By telling the story through the first-person narrative of Janina, the woman committing the murders, the author draws a portrait of a form of madness from the inside, from the perspective of the person affected. She is likeable, so the reader inevitably forms sympathy for her, and may sometimes wonder if she isn’t really the only sane person in the vicinity. Seeing the world from her perspective, we can understand her indignation at the boorish, self-righteous hunters, safe in their patriarchal world. Such is the arrogance of this male-dominated society, that weak, apparently insignificant people are ignored as if they simply don’t count; to such an extent that in fact they can get away with murder.​

 

[Baudelaire Theorist]

Runners

The central theme of this collection of long, short and very short stories is a way of life that involves non-stop travel. This is reflected in the title,Runners, which refers to a 19th-century Russian religious sect, extremists who believed the established church and state were tools of the devil, and that the only way to remain free of his influence was to be always on the move, never settled in houses, and never tied to the world as it is.
Another major theme in the book is the history of anatomy and especially the preservation of human tissue, which represents a journey in the opposite direction, as far as possible inside the human body.

With these two themes woven together to form the main threads, the structure of the book is unconventional. The effect of building up shorter and longer sections produces a “mosaic” narrative. In Runners, although the structure seems to be fragmented, recurrent themes echo throughout, such as the meaning of place and time, deformity, loss and death. Fragmentation is also a reflection of the travelling way of life – those who refuse to remain in one place accept that their world consists of a succession of pieces that do not necessarily have continuity or join in a logical way. Thus the structure of the text illustrates the way of life it describes, and is skilfully constructed, ultimately to achieve a sense of wholeness. The narrator regrets not having learned her grandfather’s craft of weaving, but in a sense she (or at least the author) has woven the text of the book to create a single piece of fabric.​

 

[Baudelaire Theorist]

Final Stories

Three women: a grandmother, her daughter and granddaughter encounter death. They face the need to examine their lives over again.

Each of them is searching for their own place. Although they belong to different generations of the same family, their worlds have no common ground. Final Stories is a contemporary saga, where the world passes right in front of the heroines’ eyes.

All three of them are eternally wandering monads, each in their own way. They are human kites. The maps they navigate by are different, but are linked by some kind of mythic nostalgia for that single, right place that cannot be reached. The first of the women journeys to the home of her childhood; the second to a lost land; and the third to an abstract northern country, a place that is located beyond shared, tribal nostalgias, but yet leads to familiar, trifling, old objects.

Only these objects are rooted in the world of “before”: before the two wars, industrialisation, globalisation – all those “-ations”. They are thus grounded in a remote, but safe world.In a sense, I wanted to challenge this saga. It would be my second attempt, after Primeval and Other Times. What a broad-ranging form the saga is, isn’t it? How much can be told within it. But a serious saga can’t succeed today. Not only because traditional bonds between the generations no longer exist, but because people no longer believe in them. It’s no accident that the last solidly-written sagas appeared in the first half of the last century, when an ordered, and still traditional world still existed. Final Stories is a saga of sorts, but imperfect, damaged. Any continuity between the generations is only formal. Here we have mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters. Their worlds have ceased to match each other’s. The true subject of sagas is the passing of things and death, which occurs to people and in front of people’s eyes. The single, authentic subject of sagas is the slow and inevitable dying of the world we know.​

Olga Tokarczuk​

 

[Baudelaire Theorist]

Playing Many Drums

Olga Tokarczuk uses words to conjure up worlds which contain an immense charge of inner truth. As in the book’s title story, she keeps pulling characters out of herself, “like rabbits out of a hat”. She doesn’t create them, she doesn’t simulate anything. Most importantly, she knows that in order to become someone else, you have to invalidate yourself, “leaving the house as A, but returning to a different house as B”. Olga Tokarczuk can do it and does it convincingly, like the heroine of the storyPlaying Many Drums. That woman was capable of enchanting foreign people from a foreign culture, in a foreign city with the story of a man killed in the fighting, who, before his death, ordered that his skin be made into a drum which would urge men into battle. Literature is also a kind of drum, calling for the hand of a seasoned drummer.​

Krzysztof Masłoń, ”Rzeczpospolita”​

The writer has divided the 19 stories into three distinct groups. The common threads for the first group are motifs which pervade life and the paper world of literature. The second pulls together stories set in the past, a continuation of her mythographic writings (…).The stories of the third group, however, represent a true watershed in her craft. Tokarczuk decided she had matured sufficiently to describe the world her readers inhabit. And she did it without giving up the central qualities of her writing (…).

The concept of “magic realism” has already been used with reference to Tokarczuk’s writing. In her present book the contemporary world has become a kind of colander which realistic nectar and only the tiniest grains of magic have passed through. In spite of that, Playing Many Drums glitters in the light of sparks thrown up in a clash of the most familiar kind of ordinariness with the Mystery.​

Paweł Dunin-Wąsowicz, ”Przekrój”​

 

[Aldawen]

Excerpt from AnnaIn in the catacombs, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (the novel is not available in English yet)

I was quite surprised to read that because it's availabe in German for five or six years by now and is part of the large Myths project of 30 or so publishers around the world. Anyway, I enjoyed it very much because Tokarczuk didn't try to transfer the myth to a "realistic" interpretation but kept the mythical aspect alive in very strong and vivid pictures. The German edition contains an afterword by Tokarczuk herself stating that she would have preferred to draw it instead of writing. I don't think that neither necessary nor desirable with regard to the outcome.

 

[Baudelaire Theorist]

I have not read this novel in question yet so its good to hear that you have enjoyed it very much.

Well, personally I am not surprised at all. In German are nine novels available (or eight ? not 100 % sure now) while in English as stated above are only two available. Even into a rather small language like Danish for example five of her books are translated.

For whatever reason Olga Tokarczuk is not very much in favor in the English speaking world. I think its kinda ironic that a Czech publisher has the world rights in English for her most famous and succesful novel "Primeval and other times" while the obvious one should be a UK or US publisher.

 

[lenz]

I just read House of Day, House of Night and liked it a lot. I felt that if such a book had been written by almost any English language writer, I would not have bothered with it in the first place, expecting House and Garden kitsch. Tokarczuk does not write kitsch and couldn't, I suppose, given the history that she delves into here.

 

[Cleanthess]

Ah serendipity. So, this morning, while I was writing on a different thread about the minor Brazilian poet Paulo Leminski, half black and half Polish who writes haiku (or hai kai, one of his books is called hi fi hai kai ), I received a parcel with the Olga Tokarczuk books I ordered from France, and her picture on the flap looks like this: View attachment 422

I already like her...
The Innanna story is the original trip to the underworld and back myth. Later instances will include Orpheus, Proserpina/Persephone, and the Maya hero twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque from the Popol Vuh, among others.
For those interested in the original telling of the story, I can recommend 'Inanna, Queen of Heaven & Earth: Her Stories and Hymns'