House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk

A new edition of Olga Tokarczuk’s 1998 novel, House of Day, House of Night is out today from Riverhead Books! Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, House of Day, House of Night offers a series of vignettes that slowly grow the reader’s sense of a town with traumatic history.

Olga Tokarczuk is squarely in the category of literary fiction, especially after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, but her work also fits in the category of weird fiction with other luminaries like Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link, as her writing slips between the banal details of everyday life and possibly supernatural or otherworldly occurrences.

In House of Day, House of Night, some of the stories are in the first person. Those ones are about interacting with a neighbor and a significant other in this small town, and they are interwoven with stories from the town’s history, including a local saint and the monk who chronicled her. The novel presents various perspectives on the town’s liminal status as the borders of Poland were shifted and people were displaced after the end of the second world war. As she often does, Tokarczuk interrogates the idea of borders and how arbitrary they are.

House of Day, House of Night is what Tokarczuk calls a “constellation novel” with seemingly disparate stories and anecdotes coming together as chapters to form an overall nuanced picture. It looks to me as though House of Day, House of Night was actually Torkarczuk’s first work translated into English back in 2002.

I’ve been a huge fan of Tokarczuk ever since reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead several years ago, also translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones. Since then I’ve read several of her other books, both getting excited when new ones come out such as The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, also translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones; and exploring her back catalog, including picture books, Primeval and Other Times, and Flights, which was translated by Jennifer Croft. There’s only one more of her books that has been translated into English (that I know of), the massive Books of Jacob, also translated by Jennifer Croft. That one is up next for me in the New Year.

Reading Tokarczuk’s back catalog, House of Day, House of Night feels like the middle installment in a triptych of her constellation novels, starting with Primeval and Other Times in 1996 showing views of a Polish village focused on the effects of World War I; then House of Day, House of Night in 1998 focusing on a different Polish village and the effect of World War II; then Flights in 2007, focusing on travel. Each one deals with the concepts of categories and boundaries, and piecing together vignettes that add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The new Riverhead edition of House of Day, House of Night will likely bring some new fans to Tokarczuk’s work, and will delight existing fans by making this early novel more accessible in English.