Year: 2018
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Literackie
Language: Polish
Polish
wordsmith and 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s worlds often hinge on
the border between the normal and the bizarre; the shadowlands between the
expected and unpredicted. As readers, we recognise the surroundings and sit
back to make ourselves comfortable, but it doesn’t take long before we notice
that there is something odd out there. Is that thing really supposed to do
that? Should these things really look like this? It is not fantastic enough to
be fantasy, and it is not ordinary enough to be realism. The best word might simply
be: bizarre.
Tokarczuk’s
most recent publication is a collection of short stories aptly named
Opowiadania bizarne (not available in English but the title translates to “Tales
of the Bizarre”). Across ten short-stories of various sizes, Tokarczuk
carefully analyzes the line between the real and the surreal and shows us how
little is needed to topple our sense of reality and make us question our senses.
The texts gently, lift the corner of the veil of reality to expose its thinness
and our weakness and vulnerability. The word “bizarre” in itself is well-chosen
as, albeit being accurate and correct in the Polish language, is not terribly
common and therefore the title itself, by containing the word “bizarre”,
becomes bizarre. Had Tokarczuk used the word “absurdalne” (absurd) or “niesamowite”
(incredible), that effect would have been lost. This is exactly the level of
subtle gothic that prevails throughout the volume.
The first
text, Pasazer (“The Passenger”), evokes our childhood nightmares and connects
them to the persons we grow up to be. What would our 8-year-old self think of
the person we are today? Or is our future self already embedded in our
childhood experiences? It is a story set in our own days, aboard a night flight across the ocean and seems to blur the relationship between experience and time.
The second
text, Zielone dzieci (“The Green Children”) examines the boundary between
humankind and nature and how it is arbitrarily decided and perceived by modern
science. The tale is based in 17th century Poland and told by the
king’s medic William Davisson while he is accompanying the monarch on an
important mission to the Eastern corners of the Polish vast realm. During their
journey, Davisson hopes for the opportunity to study a natural occurrence as if
it were supernatural but ends up studying a bizarre occurrence as if it were
perfectly natural.
Przetwory
(“Pickles”) investigates the intertemporal relationship between intention,
action, and outcome as we follow an ageing alcoholic who, having refused to move
out from his mother’s house until her death, after her funeral finds a treasure
trove of jars with increasingly unusual pickled goods in her cellar.
Next is my
favourite story, Szwy (“Seams”) which deals with the ease with which small
things can bring us out of balance. Are round postal stamps enough to make us
question our sanity? Can we really be so weak, that when a pen turns out to
write with brown ink instead of blue, we lose our mind? If so, it seems that we
are every day on the brink of falling into the abyss of madness.
Wizyta,
(“The Visit”) invites the reader into a world where people have become used to
communicating and living with machines and no longer know how to interact with
other people. It is a futuristic tale in which technology has allowed humans to
produce androids which look and behave like us, but as an effect, it seems that
humans have also become more like robots. It seems the human brain is just
another machine and if technology becomes advanced enough, it may become
difficult to tell them apart. Even for the machines themselves.
The sixth
story is Prawdziwa historia (“A True Story”) where a visiting professor on his
way down into the metro of a city where he is a stranger sees a woman fall to
her near-death on the stairs. No one in the crowded metro seems to pay any
attention, let alone try to help her. The professor, breaking with what is
apparently local custom, tries to attend to the heavily injured woman which soon
gets him into all imaginable trouble in a virtually kafkaesque chain of events.
It is a reminder that the surreal does not have to be supernatural. We humans
are quite capable of making the world a bizarre place for one another without
the help of ghosts ‘n goblins.
Serce (“The
Heart”) is the seventh story in the collection and
perhaps the one that impressed me the least. A man who has
received a heart transplant becomes obsessed with finding out about the person
who donated the heart to him. I read it as a story about how our physical body
is connected to our mind. If the heart beating inside my chest is not
originally mine, am I still I? But if that is the moral of the story, it is vague
and opaque. Maybe you, who read these words, have a better theory?
Transfugium
(“Transfuge”) is difficult to write about without spoiling the plot. It pivots
on the utilitarian idea of higher and lower pleasures. John Stuart Mill was of
the opinion that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig
satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or
the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own
side of the question”. Tokarczuk seems to find this statement arbitrary.
Gora
wszystkich swietych (“All Saints’ Hill”) is about a Polish psychologist who is
invited to a secret Swiss research facility to conduct some studies whose
purpose remains undisclosed to her. There seems to be a certain affiliation
with Serce as they both deal with the fundamental issues of
identity and body, or in this case, DNA.
The last
piece of the puzzle is Kalendarz ludzkich swiat (“The Calendar of Human
Holidays”) is a most absurd story told through the eyes of one of the specialised
caretakers of a demi-god who is artificially kept alive in order to guarantee
peace to the society that worships him. It is as much a critique of our Western
cyclical religious holidays as our fixation with historical heroes to whose
names we assign exaggerated importance in the decisions, politics, and
lifestyles of today.
Opowiadania
bizarne became Tokarczuk’s first publication
after her monumental oeuvre Ksiegi Jakubowe (not available in English but the
title means something like “The Books of Jacob”), a monumental work of almost
1,100 pages set in historical Poland. It took her four years to produce the ten
short stories, and I could almost feel the sigh of relief after finally getting
to write something of her own, not being tied down by the framework of a huge
writing project. Although the general consensus seems to be that Opowiadania
bizarne does not constitute Olga Tokarczuk’s best work, and certainly cannot
compare to her more famous pieces, I found it highly rewarding and recommend it
warmly. It raises important and provocative issues in a balanced and almost
distanced way which more than once gave me a sense of surprise, marvel.
