 | Wydawnictwo Literackie
Cracow 2007
123 × 197
296 pages
paperback
ISBN: 978-83-08-03986-1
Translation rights: De Geus |
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Olga TokarczukRunners
Excerpt
Olga Tokarczuk's new book is like a collection of longer, shorter and extremely brief stories, but in fact it forms a carefully thought-out whole and is very artfully constructed. The theme of the stories is a way of life that involves non-stop travelling. A traveller is someone who agrees to a lack of continuity in his reception of the world, to its disintegration into lots of pieces that are not necessarily logically connected. So this fragmentation also affects the structure of the narrative, which includes a multiplicity of plots that at first sight seem entirely separate. But in fact these stories have some common features, firstly to do with loss, defect and handicap, and secondly descending into the innermost recesses of the human body, techniques for making and preserving anatomical specimens, or simply the plastination of corpses.
On the one hand the book goes into the writer's personal story, into her private "I am", which serves as the title for two pieces at the beginning and end of the collection. On the other it is deeply immersed in the history of man and (especially Greek) mythology, devoted to considering the phenomena of life and death. Two concepts of time clash here: the circular notion of eternal returns typical of myths and religion, and the progressive notion typical of human life as it runs towards mystery and death, where there is a lack of belief in the constant motion of eternal returns to soothe existential fears. This book does not offer any easy answers to the difficult questions, and at every step we come up against a mystery that is impossible to disentangle. Instead of answers, here we can observe the amazing reflections and correspondences between various phenomena (e.g. all sorts of versions of "entering the labyrinth", losses, pilgrimages, floods of water or blood that inundate the world or the body, diverse aspects of the problem of defending the body's dignity). This version of the world's recurrence is accessible to us, offering a faint hope that it might be reasonable and ordered. The author gives us nothing more in the form of a logical, solid plot, but just provides some singular "points of reference" such as the mysterious Greek concept of kairos, which recurs a few times in various stories included in the book. This is a very intelligent work by a mature author - perhaps the best book that Olga Tokarczuk has written so far.
Jerzy Jarzębski
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