House of Day, House of Night
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, now, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death—with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech—was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology.
Another brilliant ‘constellation novel’ in the mode of her International Booker Prize–winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night reminds us that the story of any place, no matter how humble, is boundless.
Olga Tokarczuk is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the International Booker Prize, among many other honours. She is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, two collections of essays, and a children’s book; her work has been translated into more than fifty languages.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is an award-winning translator of Polish fiction, reportage, poetry, and children’s books. A longtime mentor for the UK's Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Program, she is also a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.
‘Darkly humorous, deadly serious, and with a quirky cast of characters that will stay with you forever, this is definitely not to be missed.’ Dua Lipa on Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
‘The pleasures of Tokarczuk’s prose are in the neat little tricks of noticing, veering into the supernatural and strange.’ Saturday Paper
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This vivid 1998 novel from Nobel winner Tokarczuk prefigures the discursive style of her later work such as Flights, with the story of a woman who moves with her husband from their Polish city to rural Silesia. There, the unnamed narrator posts an ad in the local paper about her interest in collecting people's dreams. Krysia, a senior employee at a nearby bank, dreams of hearing a voice in one ear, which feels like it's "making the whole world vibrate." Aging wigmaker Marta is mum about her own dreams but claims she can know other people's dreams just by looking at them. The narrator also takes an interest in Saint Kummernis, a 14th-century folk saint who saved a group of children sickened by poisonous mushrooms. Meanwhile, the narrator is unsettled by the monstrous, undying wolves who stalk the landscape at night, while her husband begins detecting a strange smell only he can perceive following a car accident. Mushrooms figure prominently in the episodic narrative, as the narrator eats so many that she dreams of becoming one. What emerges from this cornucopia of curiosities is a rich and pulsating view into life itself, which the narrator views as "beautiful despite the terrible things other people say about it." It's a marvel.
