(born 1962) writes novels and essays and is the most widely admired Polish author of her generation. The winner of many prizes and honours, she has the rare distinction of being equally valued by the critics and the general reading public. As a teenager she tried her hand at poetry, but then remained silent for many years, until she wrote her first novel, The Journey of the People of the Book (1993), which was very well received by the critics. The book is a sort of modern parable. On the literal level it is about an unsuccessful expedition to find the mysterious Book; along the way the two main characters fall passionately in love. The story is set in seventeenth-century France and Spain; however, it is not the local colour that predominates, but the fascinating enigma of the mysterious Book. In her second novel, E.E. (1995), Tokarczuk turns back to a past era that is much closer to our own. This time the action is set in Wrocław in the early twentieth century. The main character is Erna Eltzner (the E.E. of the title), an adolescent girl from a bourgeois Polish-German family, who is found to have the powers of a medium. Here too we find a fascination with mysterious phenomena that defy human understanding. Without doubt Tokarczuk’s greatest and most acclaimed success to date is her third novel, Prawiek and Other Times (1996). The Prawiek of the title (the word prawiek means “time immemorial”), a mythical village supposedly lying at the very centre of Poland, is an archetypal universe in miniature where all the joys and sorrows known to man are concentrated. As Jerzy Sosnowski wrote about this novel, “From odds and ends of real history Tokarczuk builds a myth, i.e. a history with a rigid order, where all the events, including the bad and tragic ones, have their reasons for happening. She organises space according to the model of the mandala – a circle drawn inside a square, which is the geometrical image of perfection and completion.” Prawiek and Other Times is the high point in modern Polish mythical fiction. Her next novel, House of Day, House of Night (1998), is very different in tone and genre. The word “novel” is quite misleading here, because the book is a hybrid of different pieces, including lots of sketches and more coherent stories, notes of an almost essay-like nature, private diary entries, etc. Indeed, House of Day, House of Night is the author’s most personal book and also her most “local”; in it she takes a close look at the area where she lives (in and around a village in the Sudety Mountains on the Polish-Czech border). Among the stories inspired by the place is the captivating tale of the mediaeval Saint Kummernis, a woman whom God saved from an unwanted marriage by giving her a man’s face. In 1997 she published a small collection of three short stories, entitled The Wardrobe, but until Playing Many Drums (2001) came out there had been few opportunities to admire her talent as a short story writer. This book includes 19 stories arranged in three groups. The first group of stories could be described as self-referring, because they are about the nature of creativity (not just literary). The second group are apocryphal; just like the tale of Kummernis which was based on an authentic story Tokarczuk found in the Lower Silesian provinces, four of the stories included in Drums are also based on local legends, which she develops and continues in her own way, adding colour and enlivening the bare historical facts. Finally, the third group includes a number of stories with realistic main themes of a moral/psychological kind. Olga Tokarczuk has also published an essay as a separate book (The Doll and the Pearl, 2000), in which she offers a new interpretation of Bolesław Prus’s late nineteenth-century novel The Doll, which is considered a masterpiece of Polish novel writing.
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