The dream continues for a page as the narrator hovers over a valley as she seeks her location in space, consciousness. Writing teachers always tell us to focus on our opening words and to hone them until they slice open a reader’s curiosity. I dreamed I was pure sight, without a body or a name.” – Olga Tokarczuk But that’s not how the book starts at all. I knew the book was about a town in Poland that had once been German and then the Germans had been relocated, the empty town filled with Poles from the side of the country that was now Russia. I did not know what Tokarczuk was doing when I read the first seven pages of House of Day, House of Night, but I was in love enough to recommend it to everyone at the cabin where I was staying. No matter that the book was first published 31 years ago on a different continent in a language I barely speak anymore. The book so perfectly met me where I was that I felt as though Tokarczuk was sitting at my side, comforting me with stories and reminders that the best things in life are unknowns. I first started hearing about Olga Tokarczuk and House of Day, House of Night this past fall, received it for Christmas, and started reading it the weekend after my grandfather ( Djiedo) died. House of Day, House of Night is the English-language debut of one of Europe's best young writers.Bless the books that find you at just the right time in your life. Since its original publication in 1998 it has remained a bestseller in Poland. Richly imagined, weaving in anecdote with recipes and gossip, Tokarczuk's novel is an epic of a small place. What emerges is the message that the history of any place-no matter how humble-is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one's self and one's dreams but also with all of the universe.
Each of the stories represents a brick and they interlock to reveal the immense monument that is the town.
With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda from the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins the radio quiz every day to the tale of the man who causes international tension when he dies on the border, one leg on the Polish side, the other on the Czech side. When the narrator moves into the area, she and discovers everyone-and everything-has its own story.
Nowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, an area that has been a part of Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia in the past. The English translation of the prize-winning international bestseller
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