TALES OF THE BIZARRE

Author: Olga Tokarczuk
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 17^th 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.