Excerpt
In her fourth novel, Olga Tokarczuk recounts stories and dreams from the hilly region of Nowa Ruda (formerly Neurode) on the Polish-Czech border. The images, memoirs and dreams date from various epochs: the medieval period, the eighteenth century, the present. Only space and nature remain unchanged; people are the fleeting dream of the landscape. The narrator's neighbor is a mythical wig-maker named Marta, who spins such local legends as the apocryphal story of Saint Kummernis, who had the face of Christ and died a marytyr's death, or the German Franz Frost, who built the house that the narrator lives in. The interwoven tales also speak of escapes into alcohol or death in the face of approaching armies.
"Dream House" (Polityka)
The book was nominated for the 1999 NIKE prize.
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