JDC posted: " Primeval and Other Times - Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)Twisted Spoon Press, 2010 Primeval is the place at the centre of the universe. Olga Tokarczuk's small Polish village of Primeval is an allegorical place, but is also firml"
Primeval is the place at the centre of the universe.
Olga Tokarczuk's small Polish village of Primeval is an allegorical place, but is also firmly planted in reality, and anyone who knows her work won't be surprised by the duality. This is one of the author's early novels, first published in 1996, and ideas and concerns that feature in her better-known work are here. The natural world, women's lives, perception of time, history, and the human hunger for meaning or finding patterns in life are integral elements of the book.
'Translucid Dandelions' photograph by Iris Greenwell
It starts with a description of Primeval's four sides, each guarded by an Archangel. But what they watch over is prosaic; on one side the border is a road that runs between two cities, another by the closest town of Jeszkotle, the third by riverside meadows, forest, and a manor house, and the last side by the White River and alder bushes. The Black River joins up with the White River below Michał Niebieski's mill which is where in 1914 we first encounter a family whose lives are at the heart of the story that covers about eighty tumultuous years of Polish history.
The first glimpse of Michał comes as two of the Tsar's soldiers arrive to take him off to war. His wife Genowefa realizes not long afterwards that she is pregnant with their first child and Misia is born in the dead of winter in the new year. In Jeszkotle Mrs. Szenbert, the Jewish pharmacist's wife, is also pregnant and due at the same time as Genowefa. They discuss whether it would be better to have a son or a daughter:
"We all need daughters. If we all started having daughters at once there'd be peace on earth." They both burst out laughing.
Another pregnancy happening around the same time is that of a young woman who seemed to arrive in Primeval out of thin air and is named Cornspike by the villagers. She's an elemental being who lives much as she wants to and leaves the village to live in a tumbledown cottage in the forest after she gives birth.
The little world of Primeval almost seems self-contained, a place out of time though that's obviously not the case, people come and go elsewhere and history breaks in, it is a world where borders are porous. Time is something that mingles and flows in countless directions, and angels, animals, people, and things experience it in different ways. Characters live in the day-to-day world and a mythical world though the two blend. It's a world of fragments; each typically brief chapter is titled: 'The Time of …', and might be a person or a church icon, but the fragments join to make up an abundant whole.
Michał does finally make his way home from Vladivostok in 1919, a shadow of himself and the miller has brought back an unusual spoil of war picked up because it smelled 'of safety, coffee, home' - a coffee grinder which his daughter is fascinated by. He is enamored by her and Misia 'fitted perfectly in the small devastated space in his soul'.
Several years later both Genowefa and Cornspike are again giving birth, this time Genowefa has a son, Izydor, but she's certain she gave birth to a daughter and this child isn't hers. He's a fussy baby who isn't developing properly and the doctor suggests he is probably hydrocephalic. After all her suspicions over Izydor, this is what brings about Genowefa's love for him.
Florentynka is one of Tokarczuk's wonderful older women characters, she has 'gone mad in the normal course of things', but with the list of things she's had to endure in her life, I'm just surprised it didn't happen earlier. She's convinced the moon caused her problems and is now watching her, and in the evenings goes out to wait for it and shake her fist at it. She takes in the village's unwanted puppies and kittens, and later Cornspike comes to give her a message and a connection is made between the older woman and Cornspike and her daughter.
At the manor house Squire Popielski with his periodic bouts of despair, doubts about the purpose of life, and many questions, has been ill when his wife brings the rabbi from Jeszkotle to visit because he has a reputation as a healer. The squire asks his questions but to his surprise the rabbi simply poses two more. As he's leaving he says to the squire:
"The time for some tribes is coming to an end. Therefore I will give you something that should now become your property."
The next day the rabbi sends over a wooden box with a book, Ignis fatuus, or an instructive game for one player, and when the box is unpacked proves to be a kind of ludo in the form of a labyrinth of eight concentric circles called Worlds. The center circle is crudely labeled Primeval and the game is another little world that mirrors the larger ones, and has what the squire thinks is a most peculiar set of rules. But he gets totally engrossed in the uncanny game.
The village's stories continue, history crosses its boundaries in the form of another war and its attendant horrors, Germans and Russians arrive in turn. Favorite stories of mine include those of Ruta, Cornspike's daughter, and Izydor and their friendship. As children they are often off exploring the forest where one day Ruta tells Izydor about the boundary of Primeval.
He stepped back a few paces and started running towards the spot where, according to Ruta, the boundary ran. Then he suddenly stopped. He himself did not know why. Something here wasn't right. He stretched his hands out ahead of him, and his fingertips disappeared.
Throughout his life Izydor asks questions and looks for patterns trying to see the connections between things or whether connections exist. He may live a circumscribed life compared to others, but he still soars elsewhere, beyond boundaries.
Turning the last page of the book after temporarily dwelling in the world of Primeval, my sense of time felt somehow enlarged which I found oddly comforting. And perhaps that's what Tokarczuk's work is able to do for a reader, reflect back the uncounted possibilities and connections that life has instead of the diminished patterns that humans are prone to fall into; she throws open blinds on windows most of us never notice are there.
Tokarczuk is fortunate in her translators, Antonia Lloyd-Jones who did this translation does a wonderful job in conveying the book's prosaic daily world and a larger reality, and she never causes a reader to slip out of the story with infelicitous phrasing.
Since we have to wait a few months until The Books of Jacob is published here, this was the perfect Tokarczuk book to read in the interim and may be my favorite so far.
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