Book Review - House of Day, House of Night
Originally published in Polish in 1998, Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night appears here in its first full, unabridged English translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Like Flights, which won the 2018 International Booker Prize in Jennifer Croft’s translation, this is a constellation novel: a mosaic of stories, myths, gossip, anecdotes, philosophical reveries and even recipes. Together, these fragments form a history of the region, Tokarczuk’s adopted home in Krajanów in south-west Poland.
An unnamed woman (the narrator) settles with her partner, R., in a remote Polish village on the Czech border. The area had been part of the German Reich until 1945. After the war, Polish citizens — displaced from territories annexed by the Soviet Union — were resettled in the homes of evacuated Germans. There is little plot and we are given only glimpses of their life together. Instead, the hamlet takes centre stage and the narrator tracks back and forth in time, collecting and sharing stories with her neighbours, recounting dreams and philosophical asides. The titular house is both a physical and a metaphorical space — a home for her dreams and imagination.
Alongside history and memory, Tokarczuk explores identity, transformation, and the meaning of home. Her meditations range from the banal to the surreal: playful riffs on mushrooms are interwoven with weighty existential questions. In one chapter, the narrator describes Archemanes’s theory of the origins of the world while helping her neighbour tie up bundles of rhubarb to sell in the market.
The narrator introduces us to an extraordinary cast of eccentrics and melancholy misfits — past and present inhabitants of the village: Marek Marek, convinced he is inhabited by a bird — “strange, immaterial, unnameable”, with “restless wings, fettered legs and terrified eyes” — drinks to escape his depression until, unable to bear his miserable existence, he hangs himself. Ergo Sum, a classics schoolmaster named by his father “in a fit of suspiciously good humour,” was forced to eat human flesh during the second world war to avoid starvation. Years later, after reading a line in Plato’s Republic (“He who has tasted human entrails must become a wolf”), Sum becomes convinced he is a werewolf and ties himself to a chair at night. Franz Frost, believing a newly discovered planet is causing his nightmares, fashions a wooden hat from a fallen ash tree. He is killed in the war after refusing to swap the hat for a helmet.
But it is Marta, the narrator’s ancient neighbour, who is the heart of the novel: a wigmaker who contends that “hair gathers a person’s thoughts as it grows . . . so that if you should want to forget something, or make a change or a new start, you should cut off your hair and bury it in the ground.” She is elusive, always just out of reach of the narrator’s grasp: “She has told me many different versions of the facts about herself. Every time, she has given a different birth year.” Simultaneously wise and naive, she moves fluidly through time: “Marta has only ever existed in the summer; in winter she disappears, like everything else around here.”
The novel is a little baggy in places. I preferred the evocative snapshots of local characters to the meandering digressions on Kummernis of Schönau, a bearded female folk saint crucified by her father, and Paschalis, the monk who longed to be a woman and chronicled her life. Lloyd-Jones’s translation eloquently captures these various registers.
Tokarczuk’s reflections are saturated with sensory language that conveys a vivid sense of the landscape and seasonal change — floods, meadow fires and gales. She also displays unnerving prescience in recognising the latent force of technology and AI: the narrator imagines her partner’s sky photographs being uploaded into a computer to create one single image: “which is sure to mean something . . . And then we’ll know.”
Orignally published by The Financial Times