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.Īll stories within the book in one way or another deal with change, transformation and the hidden dimensions of existence. Marta refuses to cohere into a predictable whole and will forever remain a puzzle. 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. 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 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. What link these different segments together are the persona of the narrator and the setting. 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."Īnd the novel does just that: it presents a mosaic of stories, comments, notes, each embedded in the framing narrative. The book opens with a description of the narrator's dream, which serves as a metaphor for Tokarczuk's novelistic ambition. 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. 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. Her books have been translated into most European languages, but the writer is just now making her American debut. Olga Tokarczuk, the author of four novels and two collections of short stories, has won great critical and popular acclaim in her native Poland.
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