House of Day, House of Night

This is a mosaic novel put together out of fragments of stories of people in a rural district in Lower Silesia where the narrator has her summer home. There are some recurring characters like the narrator's neighbour, Marta, an old lady who has been a perruquier in her former life and still makes occasional wigs, and appears to spend the winter hibernating in her cellar. But there are a lot of people who come into the book for a chapter or two and are then never heard from again.

The history of the region and its shift in identity form a recurrent theme: There are tales of the Germans who were displaced from the region in 1945 and of the displaced Poles from further East who were moved into the houses the Germans left behind. Other show more stories take us into the spatial liminality of the border with Czechoslovakia, but never quite manage to get out of the confinement of the wet, deep valleys that never get direct sun in the winter months.

Tokarczuk also seems to be very interested in the way the isolated hill country has accommodated eccentric forms of spirituality: in particular the cult of a gender-bending medieval saint (Kümmernis, or Wilgefortis) and the story of the equally gender-bending monk who's writing her biography. And there’s a mysterious community of heretical knife-makers (some kind of Waldensians?) that keeps popping up on the fringes of the narrative. Mushrooms and other food also feature heavily, and we are drawn into discussions about the nature of dreams and the way they do or don’t intersect with fictional narrative.

Very interesting and absorbing, but — as so often with Tokarczuk — I’m not entirely sure where it was meant to be going. The point seems to be the journey, rather than the destination. show less

Olga Tokarczuk first published House of Day, House of Night in Poland in 1998 under the title Dom dzienny, dom nocny. The current translation, by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, came out in the UK in 2024, and in the US in 2025. A little reminiscent of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, this book is a compendium of startling, vivid anecdotes whose focus and significance become clear as you go along. It’s highly entertaining, challenging, and awe-inspiring. This steaming dish of cassoulet has rich helpings of odd characters doing odd things, philosophic musings about abstruse subjects, and is seasoned with a generous dose of humor. A grand tour for the discerning reader.

Set in southwest Poland in the last half of the 20th Century, the show more story includes portraits of some unusual characters: there’s a gender-fluid monk called Paschalis who in the 16th Century writes the life of a saint; Pieter Dieter, who dies on the border between postwar Germany and Poland; Franz Frost, a German who is driven to worry in the early 1930s, and begins to wonder how life could proceed unaffected after a new planet is discovered. (Spoiler alert: it can’t.) And there’s Ergo Sum, a Classics teacher who suffers from lycanthropy.

But most important of all is the enigmatic Marta, whose offbeat view of the world is perhaps the most telling morsel of wisdom in the entire book. (It’s not laid out plainly; stay alert to the clues.)

This region of southwestern Poland is called Silesia, and during World War II, it was annexed by Germany, with land and property coming into the hands of German citizens. After the war, the border with Germany was shifted back westward, and the Germans who’d moved there were moved back. This swinging over and back is a regular theme, in all its varied guises; the title suggests it, as well.

Since this is not a detailed analysis, but a simple review, I will simply report that it is replete with possible philosophical approaches to the universe, even going to far as to contain, in the words of the unnamed narrator, a detailed Greek philosophy of two warring cosmic forces, chthonos, the generative, out-of-control procreative urge, and chaos, the force of destruction and decay. In the middle, like the eye of a hurricane, is the happy and well-balanced chronos. Compare and contrast this scheme with Marta’s statement about all the world’s creatures spending half their lives in the dark, and half in light. So, House of Day, House of Night, is a lumpy, delicious gravy, hinting at answers to difficult, head-scratching questions. It contains laugh-out-loud moments and sober moments of reflection. It is a book of bifurcation.

But mostly it’s another triumph from Nobel and International Booker Prize-winning Olga Tokarczuk. Set out on your own adventure and take it up right away.

https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2026/03/house-of-day-house-of-night-by-olga.... show less

Egy borús kora tavaszi hajnalon Gabriel García Marquez hirtelen felriadt.
- Mi baj van, Gabo, rémálom gyötör? - kérdezte felesége.
(Ők már csak ilyen választékosan beszélgettek, még kora reggel is. „Rémálom gyötör”, nem „rosszat álmodtál”. Hiába, az irodalmi közeg.)
- Ne is kérdezd, mi corazón. Azt álmodtam, hogy lengyel író vagyok.
- Lengyel? De honnan tudtad, hogy nem bantu vagy irokéz?
- A vodkából, a katolicizmusból, meg az indokolatlanul sok mássalhangzóból a szereplőim nevében.
- Értem.
- Gombától illatos erdőkben jártam, galócák és tinóruk között, és áradó meséket fogalmaztam piciny, pusztuló falvakról, különös szektáktól, elfeledett vagy sosem volt szentekről, show more történelmi ballépésekről, kitelepítettekről, öngyilkosokról, szeretőkről, történeteim pedig összekeveredtek egymással, egymásba kulcsolódtak, besűrűsödtek, mint a jó szilvalekvár, és a végén olyanok lettek, akár az álom. Az én álmom.
- De nem a te álmod, Gabo. Csak az álmodban a te álmod. Különben meg valaki más álma.
- Igazad van, mi media naranja. Pedig jó sztori volt. Nobel-szagú. Vállalnám.
- Neked van már Nobeled, mi vida, ne légy telhetetlen. Hagyj egyet ennek a tehetséges lengyelnek is.
- Tudom, tudom... na mindegy, főzök egy kávét.
- Rummal?
- Nem is tudom. Most valahogy inkább vodkával. show less

A double review: 'House of Day, House of Night' and 'Flights.'

I finally got around to reading 'House of Day, House of Night' on a friend's recommendation, after reading Tokarczuk 'Flights,' which is somehow even better. I'm baffled as to why this kind of form hasn't made its way into English-language writing, except in the most self-important and portentous way: a compendium of memoir (whether actual or purely formal), short stories, essays, research, tall tales, local history and so on, all of which is actually connected together in pretty obvious ways (here, by locality) rather than being aggressively meaningless, as in most fragmented anglo novels.

The center-piece to this book is the story of St. Uncumber (Wilgefortis in German), show more who repelled a rapey would-be fiance by assuming the face of Jesus, beard and all, and thus became the patron of all women in horrible relationships (until her cult was suppressed fifty odd years ago)--and, more importantly, Uncumber's hagiographer (I'm pretty sure Tokarczuk make him up). This tale was inspired by the narrator's trip to the local church, which featured a pamphlet life of the saint; much of the rest of the book details the relationship between our narrator and her neighbor, Marta, which veers between standard small town comedy and fairy-tale airiness. Usually I would roll my eyes at the latter, but here it works, because Tokarczuk presents it so modestly--no "look at me undermining paradigms!" stuff here.

Perhaps the gender-bending, localism and fairy-tale aspects will date this book in a few years; perhaps not. But it works wonderfully with the later 'Flights.' 'Flights' is tied together by the narrator's travels in the world of bodily preservation, which she refers to as her 'pilgrimages.' The narratives here are more resolutely contemporary: families go on holiday, only for disaster to strike, and so on. The past is just as important as it is in 'House,' but the stories are more--if this is the right word--mainstream. As a special bonus, there are fabulous illustrations.

While 'House' is about one place, about the immobility of history and God and so on, and how all that immobility relies on motion and change, 'Flights' is more or less the exact opposite: same form, with science (in the form plastination) taking the place of God (if not religion) and tourism taking the place of localism: it turns out that the ever changing world of the human body and tourism and love relies on some fixity, as well.

Intelligent, beautifully translated, endlessly interesting, and blessedly non-self-important, I can only hope these two novels exert some influence over writers outside of Poland as well as inside it. show less

Olga Tokarczuk's House of Day, House of Night is a dreamlike journey through the seasons in a Polish village near the German border. In turn, the narrator and her elderly neighbor Marta shell peas, hunt mushrooms and pick chamomile. Their conversations ground the narrator who otherwise watches village life from the edges of fields and forest and fends off strange intrusions from the present. In a series of vignettes, the reader is introduced to the inhabitants of a village seemingly frozen in time. A woodcutter makes the narrator uneasy, pedestrian infidelities leave the narrator bored and a schoolmaster turned werewolf disappointingly ends up as a farmhand. Intertwined is a recounting of ancient tales that swell up from the land, show more undeterred from the shifting borders and changing place names of the present. The lives of Kummernis and the saintly Brother Paschalis contrast in their solemnity with the narrator's fanciful conversations about the animals god forgot to create. A highly recommended lyric break from the tyranny of plot and characterization. show less

I loved House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (beautifully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones). Reading it was like sipping brandy -- heady, dreamy, and deserving of slow savoring. The narrator, a contemporary young woman, is a new resident of the old village of Nowa Ruda (formerly Neurude) in the Silesian region of Poland. Over a period of a spring, summer and autumn, with the companionship of her neighbor, Marta, an ancient wigmaker with a deep connection to the natural world, she slowly unfolds the stories of the villagers, their history and their interconnectedness. It's a gorgeous meditation on nature and humanity that rather defies description -- as much poetry as fiction.

This is the first paragraph:

"The first night I had show more a dream. I dreamed I was pure sight, without a body or a name. I was suspended high above a valley at some undefined point from which I could see everything. I could move around my field of vision, yet remain in the same place. It seemed as if the world below was yielding to me as I look at it, constantly moving toward me, and then away so first I could see everything, then only tiny details."

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fiction (translated from original Polish, 1998) - fragments of stories and glimpses into the lives of villagers in a remote part of Poland (near the Czech border but also in an area that used to be within Germany's borders), many revolving around or told by a woman who is interested in learning about everyone's dreams and her eccentric elderly neighbor Marta.

This is one of those books you pick up and read a bit at a time and ponder the goings on behind the quiet atmosphere of the village. Or something like that. It won't make for the best introduction to the author (because the story arc, if one exists, has been scattered to near oblivion), but if you are willing to sit for a bit and savor the lyrical whispery prose of the author and show more just let things happen or not happen at their own pace, you might like this. Halfway through the book (hundreds of pages in), several of the different narratives hint at a coming or previous rapture, that the people moving around their daily lives have in fact been dead and are merely dreaming. There's also significant time spent detailing a woman saint and the monk (secretly a trans woman) who writes about her. show less