A Nobel Winner Blurs Genres and Genders in This Bewitching Novel

HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

One of the minor subplots of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel “House of Day, House of Night” involves a drifter named Leo, who was injured in a mining accident as a young man and lives off state compensation. He is something of an astrologer, obsessed with the sequences of numbers that underlie the universe. When his wife dies, he becomes a “proper clairvoyant”:

Images that had been suppressed for years began to surface in his head and spread like frost on a damp windowpane — they linked arms unexpectedly and made rings and fancy sequences; quite at random they built bewitching patterns that made perfect sense.

Leo’s abilities shouldn’t be taken entirely at face value: He’s a little crazy. But this description of his mental processes could also apply to the novel itself. Tokarczuk, a Nobel laureate who first published this book in her native Poland in 1998, has described it as a “constellation novel” in the vein of her much-acclaimed 2007 book “Flights.”

Indeed, “House of Day, House of Night” is not so much a novel as it is an anthology of stories, poems, recipes and other short writings that are linked, like the frost on a windowpane, by “bewitching patterns”: themes, people, settings.

The two main characters are the unnamed narrator and her neighbor Marta, an old woman who tends to appear only in the summer. Marta lives alone and is hard to pin down in normal terms — she has no relatives to speak of, and even her history is a little vague. “She has told me many different versions of the facts about herself,” the narrator says.

Marta is identified mostly by vibe. She has a certain smell, “of damp forced to dry out quickly,” and makes wigs in her spare time, though she doesn’t seem to sell any. The two women spend time together over the hot summer days, going through their routines: cooling off, running errands, doing chores, people-watching, swapping recipes and stories and theories of life.

But this isn’t really a novel about their friendship. At the heart of the book are two longish narratives. The first, written in a booklet that the narrator finds in a souvenir shop, is “The Life of Kummernis of Schonau,” based on the legend of St. Wilgefortis. In it, a convent girl dreams of growing a beard to avoid being forced into marriage by her father; she wants to stay pure and virginal. The dream comes true, but the consequences are grim.

The second narrative is about the monk who wrote “The Life of Kummernis,” a young man named Paschalis whose sexual awakening involves trying to do what he describes in his tale, only in reverse: to become a woman. It turns out, though, that he can write the book only when he ceases to be a body at all. “If he cut himself off from the flavor of food, the scent of the air, and sounds … with no sense of touch, taste or smell,” Tokarczuk writes, “his body would turn to wood, retreat and wait for his return.”

Paschalis’s disembodiment reminds us of the narrator’s own in the opening passage of the novel: “I dreamed I was pure looking, pure sight, without a body or a name. … There was no before and no after, no sense of anticipation of anything new, because there was nothing to gain or lose.” The patterns in the frosted pane are linking up.

Junctures and borderlands are rich sources of material for Tokarczuk — the gray areas of gender, the separation of mind and body, the line between the human and the natural worlds. One of the novel’s threads involves werewolves; another offers semi-joking recipes for poisonous mushrooms. National and political boundaries come into play, too: The novel is set in Silesia, a region of southwest Poland that abuts the Czech Republic. In one scene, a man dies on the border, and since the guards on both sides don’t want to deal with the necessary paperwork, they keep pushing his corpse from one country to the other.

All of these discursive strands make the book seem more abstract than it really is. Tokarczuk is an excellent storyteller. In spite of what the narrator says about her dreams, she is very good at creating a “sense of anticipation,” although the structure of the novel requires that she keep building momentum from a standing start.

There are other costs. Marta’s gnomic insights don’t always sound that different from the narrator’s, and since she isn’t really central to any story lines of her own, she sometimes feels like a mouthpiece for a certain kind of detached wisdom: “Marta said that hair gathers a person’s thoughts as it grows. It accumulates them in the form of indeterminate particles.”

Occasionally, the thematic links between chapters are conveniently perfect. A drunkard feels as though he has “a bird inside him” and many stories later, in “The Life of Kummernis,” the saint makes “the sign of the cross” over a heavy drinker and draws out “a hideous great bird that beat its wings awkwardly and flew away.”

Yet this is not a novel undermined by whimsy or trickery. Tokarczuk is far too good a writer not to complicate her own games. “I have often asked Marta to tell me her dreams,” the narrator says, “but she just shrugs. I don’t think she’s interested.” In spite of something old-fashioned about the prose, there are vivid descriptions of contemporary life: “Instead we opened up bright computer worlds and disappeared into them all evening. In the artificial sunlight of the screens, our faces shone ghastly pale.” (The book has been beautifully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.)

Every dreamlike image or detail is matched by another with the weight and ordinariness of real life: “From the bus stop in the village we picked up Krysia, who was wearing men’s gum boots and getting soaked in the rain. As soon as she got in she took them off and put on a pair of shoes she had in a carrier bag.”

There’s no real plot, of course, and the stories don’t point in any clear direction, yet somehow the novel does achieve a kind of deepening gravity. That’s partly because of the history underlying it, of wars and border disputes, but also because so many of the games Tokarczuk plays pay off. The line between what is real and what isn’t matters less and less in the end: “All over the world, wherever people are sleeping, small, jumbled worlds are flaring up in their heads, growing over reality like scar tissue.”

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