Fiction. Central European Studies. Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Tokarczuk's third novel, PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES was awarded the Polityka Passport Prize in 1996 and the Koscielski Prize in 1997, which established the author as a leading voice in Polish letters. It is set in the mythical village of Primeval in the heart of Poland, which is populated by eccentric, archetypal characters. The village, a microcosm of the world, is guarded by four archangels, from whose perspective the novel chronicles the lives of Primeval's inhabitants over the course of the feral 20th century. In prose that is forceful and direct, the narrative follows Poland's tortured political history from 1914 to the present and the episodic violence that is visited on ordinary village life. Yet this is also a novel of universal dimension that does not dwell on the parochial. A stylized fable as well as epic allegory about the inexorable grind of time, the clash between modernity (the masculine) and nature (the feminine), it has been hailed across Europe as a contemporary classic.
Author City: Wroclaw POL
Olga Tokarczuk was born in 1962 in Sulechow near Zielona Gora, Poland. A recipient of all of Poland's top literary awards, she is one of the most critically acclaimed authors of her generation. Since the publication of her first book, a collection of poems, in 1989, Tokarczuk has published nine volumes of stories, novellas, and novels and one book-length essay. Her novels PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES and House of Day, House of Night has been translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Tokarczuk is the recipient of the 2008 Nike Prize, Poland's national book award.
Reviews and Other Links
author page @ Polish Writing
Angela DeMarco @ Bookslut
Lisa Dolensky @ NewPages
Stephan Delbos @ the Prague Post
David Miller @ Krakow Post
Katie Eberhart @ Tarpaulin Sky Reviews
about the translator
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is one of the leading translators of Polish literature into English. Having studied Russian and Ancient Greek at Oxford University, she has translated many works of Polish fiction into English, among them PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES and
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk and Pawel Huelle's
Mercedes-Benz and
Castorp. She is the recipient of this year's
Found in Translation Award for her translation of Pawel Huelle's
The Last Supper. She lives in London.
"[The novel] recounts the hard passage of an imaginary village through a century of conflict, distant coups and decay. Centre-stage, however, are the village's colourful characters: an aristocrat who withdraws from life to play a rabbi's fantastical board game promising answers to life's great questions; a dog-loving madwoman pursued by the moon; a Soviet soldier who seeks sexual relief among forest beasts; a priest who wishes to tame a frog-infested river. Overlooking all is a vain selfish God who has become thoroughly bored with mankind and who must play second fiddle in Ms Tokarczuk's pantheistic world to material things: a sprawling mushroom root which links all matter together or a wooden coffee-grinder with which a young girl mills out time."
—The Economist
"From odds and ends of real history Tokarczuk builds a myth, i.e., a history with a rigid order, where all the events, including the bad and tragic ones, have their reasons for happening. She organizes space according to the model of the mandala—a circle drawn inside a square, which is the geometrical image of perfection and completion."
—Jerzy Sosnowski, Gazeta Wyborcza
"In this epic novel Olga Tokarczuk has drawn on the tradition of magic realism to create a world permeated with ancient myths as much as it is firmly rooted in the present."
—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"The author draws the reader into a sadistic world that is described in a language that is crystalline and pure as water from a well."
—De Morgen
"Olga Tokarczuk's myth of 'Primeval' is far from simplistic. She is not satisfied with merely glossing traditional mythical narratives, and we will not find many of these in her novel. Her method is more sophisticated. Perhaps we would do well to recall that wonderful Polish tradition of 'mythmaking,' as in the works of Bruno Schulz and Boleslaw Lesmian, where the mythical perception of the world takes precedence over simply presenting the memes of myth, as it were, which are meant to point to readymade archetypes. Tokarczuk shows no fear in transgressing this alluring border, and for this reason her myth is fresh, original, even if uncommonly consistent within the context of the whole of her work. As opposed to Schulz's chaotic, fantastical mythmaking, PRIMEVAL is calming and meditative. The novel is distinguished from the writing of Tokarczuk's generational cohorts who share a similar poetic vision: it has none of Andrzej Stasiuk's zeal in Tales of Galicia for superseding older myths with the modern myth of consumerism, nor does it have any of Magdalena Tulli's complex semantics and labyrinthine mystifications. While PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES addresses similar questions, its approach is highly original and, especially in a time of postmodern experimentalism, singularly poetic."
—Literarni noviny (Prague)