TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Author: Harper Lee
Year: 2010 (1960)
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (Translator Jadwiga P. Westrup)

99 years ago, 19-year-old Dick Rowland was shining shoes in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. As an African-American, the only lavatory available to him, according to the law of the land in 1921, was at the top of the nearby Drexel building. The lift was operated by 17-year-old Sarah Page; a white girl. Upon entering the lift, Dick tripped. To break his fall, he instinctively grabbed on to Sarah’s arm accidentally tearing part of her sleeve. He was promptly arrested for attempted rape. The headline in The Tulsa Tribune on the next day read ”Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator”.

This triggered the most violent assault on the black community ever perpetrated on US soil. For 16 hours during the night between the 31^st of May and 1^st of June, white mobs, supported by the local government, including U.S. aircraft, wreaked havoc on the black district of Tulsa. Houses were razed, fires started, bombs dropped from the air, people maimed in the street. The Tulsa Tribune reported 176 dead. Today it is known as “The Tulsa Massacre”.

I have no idea if Harper Lee knew about the Tulsa Massacre when she wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Dödssynden” (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) but growing up in the 30s and 40s in Alabama, she certainly must have had ample opportunity to study racial divide and the oppression of black people.  In many ways, the events in 1921 bear a lot of resemblance to Lee’s story. There is the segregated community, the black man wrongly accused of rape, the assumption of guilt based on skin colour, the dreadful consequences, and the ensuing feeling of shame.

    

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is a highly recommendable read. For starters, it is brimming with attractive characters, scenery, intriguing plots and subplots, and it is well written with a stable pace and solid dialogue. But that is all merely fine craftsmanship. The genius of this novel lies on a different level.

The true power of “To Kill a Mockingbird” is derived from how immersive it is. Lee is in no hurry to skip past seemingly irrelevant scenes which serve the purpose of subtly setting the scene. The reader is invited into the idyllic and carefree world of 9-year-old Scout Finch and her elder brother Jem. We learn about their hometown, Maycomb, Alabama, and about its citizens who are just as diverse and complex as people are in general. Scout and Jem like some of them more than others, as is natural, but they are all, in their own way, decent folks.

One of them is Scout’s and Jem’s father Atticus Finch; a local barrister who will soon be appointed as the accused Tom Robinson’s public defender. He is a balanced, principled, and fair man who works too much and who sometimes allows Scout and Jem more freedom than they would like.

What I find so ingenious about this angle is that in the first half of the book, with all their weaknesses and faults, most citizens of Maycomb seem likeable and, for lack of a better word; good.

Yet when the crisis hits and their characters are tested, they change. Some of those who used to smile and joke, now show up on the doorstep carrying torches and pitchforks. Others, who used to curse and cause trouble, stand up to the trouble-makers. The majority, hunker down and try to come up with excuses why not to take a stand. Those who fret about how the German Nazis treat the Jews and applaud the missionary work to help the Mruna people in Africa are unable to translate their indignation to the reality of their own neighbourhood. Scout and Jem change, too. Jem becomes angry and relentless in his judgment of his fellow Maycombians. Scout’s mind changes from that of a happy-go-lucky little girl to that of an initially confused but increasingly determined young woman.

The only person who remains unfazed by the commotion is Atticus Finch. One of the Finch-family’s neighbours, Maudie, at one point in the book says that Atticus is unique by being the same person in the courthouse as he is in the street. True to that, while fighting vehemently for the rights of his wrongly accused client, he is able to predict his defeat despite overwhelming evidence in his favour. He knows the hearts and souls of the Alabamians all too well to hope that they will put their racism aside to provide justice to an innocent black man against the word of a lying white woman. He knows, but he takes up the fight anyway. In him, Harper Lee gives us a role model. She shows us that no matter how good we think we are, we need to stay true to ourselves when the world around us crumbles and everybody else turns. Atticus Finch is the epitome of the saying “not all heroes wear a cape.” By this, Lee compels us to speak up and not remain silent, even when we are in the minority. Even if we are sure to lose the battle. It is a powerful message of moral courage.

It is imperative that we recognise, that this book is not a history lesson. Racism and bigotry are not things of the past. In the last few days, we have seen the public outcry around the western world about yet another atrocity committed against a black person in the US. Protests and violence follow. “To Kill a Mockingbird” is not about the 1930s. It is not about an era at all. It is about a mindset that transcends generations and which is still very much present in this day and age.

So... what of Dick Rowland? Since Sarah refused to press charges, he was eventually exonerated and immediately left Tulsa to settle in Kansas City. No crime had apparently been perpetrated. Still, the Tulsa Massacre happened.

On the 99^th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C. commanded the police to clear the Black Lives Matter demonstration outside his window so that he could cross the street to a nearby church to have propaganda photos taken wielding a Bible in his hand.

I pray that the 100^th anniversary will be presided over by a more worthy American. Atticus Finch's work is not nearly done.

NAZISM IN SWEDEN

Author: Heléne Lööw
Year: 2016 (1998, 2004, 2015)
Publisher: Ordfront förlag
Language: Swedish

I have always found it mildly amusing that the word “Nazi” and “Neanderthal” stand right next to each other in the Swedish Academy’s dictionary of the Swedish language (Svenska Akademiens Ordbok). In my opinion, few if any ideologies in the history of mankind, have been as catastrophic as Nazism. While many ideologies, religions, philosophies, cosmologies, and political and economic systems and beliefs have repeatedly been abused to do evil they were typically not fundamentally intended for, Nazism stands out as being inherently wicked. Being the naïve and philanthropic person that I am, I have long chosen to view the rank and file Nazi sympathisers as intellectually challenged individuals who have been duped by a small group of vile haters, rather than believing that our species could broadly harbour such heinousness and depravation that the core ideology of Nazism would require. They were to me, in the colloquial use of the word, Neanderthals.

Little did I know, that I had but a vague idea of the taxonomy of racism, anti-Semitism, Fascism, Nazism, and other related movements and confusions. This is where Heléne Lööw’s exposé “Nazism in Sweden” across three tomes (“Nazismen i Sverige 1924-1979”, “Nazismen i Sverige 1980-1999”, and “Nazismen i Sverige 2000-2014”) turned out to prove invaluable.

Heléne Lööw is an Associate Professor / Reader of History at Uppsala University in Sweden and has dedicated her academic life to the study of extreme right-wing organisations. Her contributions to the field span over more than three decades and she has published extensively on the issue. The present trilogy was never supposed to be one. Lööw writes in the preface that she intended “Nazism in Sweden” to be a conclusion or a summary. Only later did she realise that what she had been studying was not the decline of a movement. It was the beginning of one.

The first volume introduces the history of Nazism in Sweden dating back to the Interwar period where the ideas of National Socialism were first introduced in Sweden. Nationalism, Socialism, anti-Semitism, racism, and anti-democratism were already ubiquitous in Swedish society making the building blocks readily available. Even so, Lööw paints a picture of a highly fragmented Nazi movement with disparaging strategies and problematic relationships with other Nazi organisations in Sweden and Europe, particularly the NSDAP after the German invasion of Denmark and Norway.

The second volume is based on Lööw’s extensive research and personal network in the Swedish extreme right community. Lööw guides us through the gradual transformation from nationalism to white supremacy. Whereas Nazism is naturally isolationistic in its focus on the nation-state, white supremacy is by definition international. The period 1980 – 1999 was also the age in which the old-school Nazis from the 30s and 40s handed the reins over to the next generation. The arrival of the music genre White Noise receives particular attention from Lööw as it became a powerful tool for nationalists to recruit young and influential minds.

The third (and final?) volume accounts for the most recent radicalisation. While racist, anti-semitic and anti-democratic opinions were shameful and covert in the past, the 2000s have seen a broad and public radicalisation of opinions across all of Europe, including Sweden. Far-right political parties entered parliaments left, right, and centre. In Sweden, they call themselves Sweden Democrats and make no secret of their racist agenda. Fascism and racism have gained social acceptance. The arrival of social media gave conspiracy theorists and tinfoil hats a completely new platform to proliferate the myth that there are forbidden truths “they don’t want us to speak about”. This idea entered mainstream politics and triggered a widespread rejection of science, facts, and confidence of authority.

Lööw’s work is interesting in many ways. It helped me open my eyes and understand parts of this world that I hitherto had not considered. Or looked away from. Here are some, but far from all, take-aways.

• Not all racists are Nazis. National Socialism is a well-defined and strictly observed socialist ideology. Nazis have tried to organise labour unions and guilds, they have proposed enhanced public safety nets and social security, advocated the abolition of private ownership, and in many other ways acted like other socialists with one key difference: nationalism. Whereas classical socialism takes aim at social class and the means of production, Nazism focuses on nationality and ethnicity. By its very nature, it is against globalisation, it equals race with privilege, and is collectivistic as opposite to individualistic. In a Swedish Nazi utopia, Swedes (by any given definition) are collectively the lords within the territory of Sweden. It is a socialist society where no Swede stands above any other and all Swedes stand above all others. The Nazi political struggle is not between class and class, but between nationality and nationality. 
• The Nazi movement has many similarities with religion. They have rites and revival meetings, they observe special holidays and traditions, they adore deities and saints. Heléne Lööw affords considerable space, particularly in the second and third volumes, to the quasi-religious martyrs, myths, rites, art, and symbols that are part of the Nazi movement in Sweden. I was surprised by the sheer volume and complexity of the Nazi pantheon and the detailed knowledge and education in the field that the dedicated Nazi sympathisers acquire. “Nazism in Sweden” offers a detailed report of the different martyrs and demigods that Swedish Nazis worship, as well as the fervour with which they do it. 
• A third observation, which is of particular interest to me, is the history of other political movements which share the white supremacist ideology with the Nazis but are different in other ways. There are the globalists who want to unite all white supremacy movements, regardless of nationality. There are the Christian white nationalists, mostly in the USA. There are the anti-Semites who root for the Muslims. There are the Islamophobes who root for the Jews. It seems to me that with so many minorities to hate, it is difficult to fit all of that hatred into one organisation or political movement. Consequently, many Nazis frequently jump between parties and action groups so that they can always savour the hatred flavour of the day. 
• Throughout history, there have only been two political forces in Sweden which have consistently and methodically opposed Nazism under any guise. These are the Liberals and the Social Democrats. No matter what modern racists would like to have us believe, Hjalmar Branting, Per Albin Hansson, and Tage Erlander were all staunchly anti-Nazi and pro-democracy. Communists may rightfully claim to have consistently opposed Nazism, too, but they did not defend democracy, which is why I disqualify them on this point.

“Nazism in Sweden” is written in a remarkably dispassionate tone, to the point of almost sounding bland. In the preface, the author discloses some hints to her antipathy to all things associated with the Nazi movement in Sweden and elsewhere, but the tone in the book is balanced, objective, and unbiased. At times, I even had to remind myself that the people quoted as expressing one or another opinion were in fact Nazis who actively sought to bring about the demise of this country and the freedom of its people. Lööw grants them the right to sound human, far removed from the demonic depictions of Nazi leaders that we are used to.

This brings me to a point where I realise, after having read all three books and a total of more than 1,300 pages, that there are similarities between Nazis and Neanderthals after all: both are routinely underestimated by the general public.

THE COLOR PURPLE

Author: Alice Walker

Year: 1987 (1982)

Publisher: Bokförlaget Trevi

Language: Swedish (Translator Kerstin Hallén)

It has been a while since I last read an epistolary novel. In fact, I had almost elevated to a truism the idea that the genre itself belonged in the beginning of the 20th century or, if still exercised, was chiefly intended to provide an archaic or comic effect best suited for children's books such as "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4" or the Swedish smash hit "In Ned's Head". But to every rule, if indeed this is a rule, there are exceptions. "The Martian", by Andy Weir, "We Need to Talk about Kevin" by Lionel Shriver, and "An Eye Red", by Jonas Hassen Khemiri are some notable 21st-century examples. 

One of the most well-known epistolary novels, “Purpurfärgen” ("The Colour Purple") by Alice Walker, however, is not a fin-de-siécle creation but was published in 1982. The novel constitutes a fictional diary or series of letters that the young African-American girl, Celie, in the American South begins to write to God in an attempt to make sense of a profoundly miserable and hopeless universe. Her mother dies, leaving her with her abusive father who frequently rapes her and twice impregnates her. Before long, he gives her away in marriage to another wife-beating man who is more interested in her younger sister, Nettie, but has to settle for her. She is again beaten and abused, not only by her several times older husband but also by his adolescent children from an earlier marriage. After Nettie runs away from their father and is not heard from again, Celie has absolutely nothing left. 

This is when the turnaround germinates. With the help of newly forged and unexpected friendships, Celie slowly begins to create room for herself in this world. A wonderful journey, which will take decades, commences.  

"The Color Purple" could almost be considered a Bildungsroman, but it is nothing of the sort. It is quite clear that this is more than a story about one girl. This is a story about an entire revolution. Black women's uprising against male and white oppression. The events, characters, and environments were never intended to be realistic. They are all there to tell the story about a widespread awakening that Walker was trying to not only describe but rather to instigate. 

A quick analysis of the characters provides a lot of information. Each of them serves a singular purpose in the story. Broadly speaking, it can be summarised as "black woman = good, man or white = bad." Celie is the embodiment of the oppressed black woman. She is uneducated, abused, unattractive, and bereft of all self-esteem. Her transformation is the transformation of black women as a collective.  

Each of the key female characters around Celie symbolises some desirable quality in a black woman. Nettie is education. Shug Avery is wealth and beauty. Sofia is independence and courage. Mary Agnes is talent. In combination, they paint the picture of the competent, strong, and free African-American woman. And symbolically, they all need to come together to set the oppressed woman free. 

The diary format works reasonably well although Celie’s idiosyncratic use of the English language sometimes makes the text difficult to follow.  As I consumed this title in its Swedish translation, I had reason to consider the challenges that the translator must have faced. The black voice of southern US has no immediate counterpart in the Swedish language and so Kerstin Hallén had to create a unique voice for Celie in the Swedish version. The English syntax and grammar are designed to reflect the way a person like Celie would talk, not necessarily how she would write, which would make it unusually suitable for an audiobook. In the Swedish version, Hallén has opted for an imagined rural dialect, possibly from her own native Jämtland. Contrary to the English original, Celie’s lack of education is mirrored in spelling errors in the Swedish version. However, the spelling, including the errors, remains consistent throughout the book, and despite Celie’s struggle to spell basic words, she still manages to spell the notoriously difficult state name of Tennessee accurately in her diary. This technique, as with everything else in the book, is clearly designed to convey a message and build dramaturgy rather than to be credible or authentic. 

Humble to the fact that my knowledge of American literature, and especially Black literature, is best described as rudimentary, I will not try to put "The Color Purple" in a broader context. In my own reading, Alice Walker takes the place as a worthy heir to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Even though "The Color Purple" is set in a historical context at the beginning of the 20th century, I imagine that Walker wants us to recognise the modern-day struggles of Black women in the United States. The emancipation journey once embarked on by the African-American community in the 19th century is far from complete. Novels, essays, academic papers, news reports, and everyday conversation and actions are necessary to maintain direction and momentum. As long as racism, bigotry, men’s violence against women exist, Alice Walker’s classic novel will sadly remain relevant.

EBRD Literature Prize 2020 Shortlist

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) continue their support for Eastern European literature in English translation and for a third time published the shortlist for the annual EBRD Literature Prize.

The EBRD was established in 1991 in response to the vast need of investment into the newly dissolved Soviet Union and its former satellite states in Eastern Europe. Since then, more countries of operation have been added in the Middle East and North Africa.

Last year's winner was "The Devil's Dance" by Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, translated into English by Donald Rayfield. Both writer and translator are awarded EUR 10,000 each. It was a historic event as "The Devil's Dance" was the first novel ever to be translated into English from Uzbek.

The Shortlist for 2020 is as follows:

• "Devilspel" author Grigory Kanovich (Russian), translator Yisrael Elliot
• "Pixel" author Krisztina Tóth (Hungarian), translator Owen Good
• "Zuleikha" author Guzel Yakhina (Russian) translator Lisa C Hayden

The winner will be announced on the 22 of April.

THE LOVER

Author: Marguerite Duras
Year: 1986 (1984)
Publisher: Månpocket
Language: Swedish (Translator Madeleine Gustafsson)

A distant acquaintance of mine, whose creative work I have been following for some time, is valiantly toiling and moiling on a manuscript which I am sure will one day become a literary masterpiece. Its working title inspired me to read a temporarily better-known novel; “Älskaren” (“The Lover”) by French novelist and playwright Marguerite Duras.

The only thing this book and that of my friend’s have in common is the title so let me begin this review from that end. For it is indeed curious how potently a title or a keyword can guide our thoughts and our attention. Goodreads introduce "Älskaren" as “The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese man.” Penguin Random House present it as “the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover.” Bookmate calls it “unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between two lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl’s family apart.”

My question to all these reviewers is; is it though? I wonder what the reviews would sound like if the title of the book had been something else. What would each of these readers see, what would they notice, what would they take with them if the title had been “The Mother” or “The Family”? How would they introduce the same content had it borne “The Anger”, “The Pride”, or “The Anguish” on the cover?

When I read Duras’s novel, I do not see a doomed love story between a man and a woman separated by money, race, or age. To me, “Älskaren” is an elderly woman’s final stand against her childhood trauma, a testament to failed motherhood from the perspective of an emotionally abused daughter. It is a cathartic scream of misery, resistance, and grievance. It is the long-overdue truth spoken to a power no longer alive. The actual lover in the novel plays a role not much different from the burning giraffe in Salvador Dali’s famous painting. He is but an alibi; a key that unlocks a box of emotions. He is there to make a woman out of the girl. He is there to unveil the ugliness of her family’s iniquity, arrogance, and racism. But the book is not about him. It is about her.

Although we never learn the name of the narrator, it is widely accepted that the book is largely autobiographic, and the characters are very thinly veiled. The name of the narrator’s hysterical mother, for instance, is Marie Legrand. Duras’s real mother’s maiden name was also Legrand. Duras herself used the pseudonym “Mary Josephine Legrand” while writing for Elle Magazine many years before the book. “Marguerite Duras”, by the way, is also a nom de plume as the writer’s real name is Marguerite Donnadieu (Duras being the small municipality in Lot-et-Garonne in southern France whence her family originated and where her father was buried).

Stylistically, The Lover follows the norm of the Noveau Roman. The narration addresses observations rather than facts, the chronology is broken. The narrator jumps freely and seemingly haphazardly between telling the story in the first and third person. The language is introverted but lively, poetic, at times almost ceremonious. Some parts are like a slow-flowing river, perhaps mimicking the Mekong River on the banks of which much of the story unfolds. Thoughts come and go, sometimes mid-sentence, emerge for a moment and disappear beneath the surface again. But now and again, a word or phrase anchors the story in the consciousness of the reader. Like a gunshot. “Very early in my life, it was too late”, or “Alcohol took over the function that God had never had” may serve as such examples.

"Älskaren" is a tiny piece of literature as worldly dimensions go, my paperback copy is a little over 100 pages, and should not take the average reader longer than a couple of hours to read. I hereby submit that they should be hours well spent.

SEVEN GOTHIC TALES

Author: Karen Blixen
Year: 1955 (1934)
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (Translator Sonja Vougt)

There are writers of mystery, and then there are mysterious writers. Karen Blixen, also known under her pen name Isak Dinesen, strikes me as the latter; easy to love, difficult to understand, impossible to categorise... other than just that: mysterious. Her writing has been compared to Edgar Allan Poe’s horror, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s mysticism and E.T.A. Hoffman’s magic realism but still, it says little of the tales that this Danish adventurer and storyteller forged.

A way, perchance, to illustrate this is the struggle the editors must have had trying to name her debut work, a collection of seven short stories published in 1934. In its original English, it is known as “Seven Gothic Tales”. The Swedish edition and the first translation that the author herself approved of, is “Sju romantiska berättelser” i.e. Seven Romantic Tales. Blixen’s own translation into Danish bore the title “Syv fantastiske fortaellinger” or Seven Fantastic Tales. The first German translation was called "Die Sintflut von Norderney und andere seltsame Geschichten", or in English The Deluge at Norderney and Other Remarkable Tales, whereas the Poles published it under the title "Siedem niesamowitych opowiesci" or Seven Incredible Tales. 

After having read them, I can fully relate. This is a collection of peculiar stories presented in a, for Blixen’s time, unusual way in many respects.

One is that, instead of being ahead of her time, or at least of it, Blixen wrote in an oddly conservative, almost archaic fashion. Although being published in the 1930s which was a decade that gave the world titles such as Brave New World, Grapes of Wrath, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and Le Mur, all of which are milestones for literary modernity and much influenced by the seeming progress of psychoanalysis and political turmoil of the time between the wars, Sju romantiska berättelser is written in a style that predates it by a century. The language is intricate and theatrical, the characters stereotypical and unnatural, and the aristocratic setting old-fashioned.

True to form, Blixen allows most of her stories to be recounted in the shape of memories. Often the frame is a conversation during which one of the characters tells a story to their companions about something that happened a long time ago. In some cases, Blixen’s story-teller tells a story about a story-teller who tells a story. In so doing, Blixen tries to connect the story she wants to tell to the reader in her own era. Moreover, it seems to me like she has put an additional layer in her narrative to, as it were, distance herself from the content of the story and give it a veil of uncertainty that just may be enough to make it more credible.

The stories themselves are of varying quality ranging from pointless to brilliant. The most famous item, “The Deluge at Norderney”, is certainly the strongest of the tales and also presents the most interesting characters and a surprising finale. I consider “The Dreamers” to be another solid performance, which I enjoyed quite a bit even though it took me a moment to come to terms with the different levels of narration and the graphic way certain ethnic groups are presented. At her best, Blixen manages to lure her reader into an atmosphere of anticipation, where something can happen at any time. And when it finally happens, the turn of events propels the story into a completely different direction than expected. At her worst, the story resembles a rock anthem that builds up to a powerful climax only to fade out and leave the listener wondering what on earth happened to the chorus.

Two things to look out for is how the stories sometimes are interconnected. A character that only quickly flashes by in one of the tales can be the protagonist of another. Another is Blixen’s habit of challenging her readers with quotes in German, French, Latin, and Italian without providing neither a translation or a source. I do not know if the meanings of the quotes were obvious to an average reader of her days, but they certainly weren’t always clear to me. My guess is that she took delight in the thought of making her reader feel a tad bit uneducated in the presence of her writing.

That would correspond well to the person that Karen Blixen seems to have been. She has been described as a highly complex person, arrogant, egocentric, and in constant need of attention and accolade. Highly intelligent but unreliable. Innovative but lazy. Perhaps it makes sense that a person like that would write stories like these.

Although a few of Blixen’s Sju romantiska berättelser were barely sufferable, others are highly stimulating, which, all things considered, makes me want to recommend this collection for those who take an interest in historical books and who do not mind obsolete stereotypes and outdated language. 

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.