Olga Tokarczuk first published House of Day, House of Night in Poland in 1998 under the title Dom dzienny, dom nocny. The current translation, by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, came out in the UK in 2024, and in the US in 2025. A little reminiscent of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, this book is a compendium of startling, vivid anecdotes whose focus and significance become clear as you go along. It’s highly entertaining, challenging, and awe-inspiring. This steaming dish of cassoulet has rich helpings of odd characters doing odd things, philosophic musings about abstruse subjects, and is seasoned with a generous dose of humor. A grand tour for the discerning reader.
Set in southwest Poland in the last half of the 20th Century, the story includes portraits of some unusual characters: there’s a gender-fluid monk called Paschalis who in the 16th Century writes the life of a saint; Pieter Dieter, who dies on the border between postwar Germany and Poland; Franz Frost, a German who is driven to worry in the early 1930s, and begins to wonder how life could proceed unaffected after a new planet is discovered. (Spoiler alert: it can’t.) And there’s Ergo Sum, a Classics teacher who suffers from lycanthropy.
But most important of all is the enigmatic Marta, whose offbeat view of the world is perhaps the most telling morsel of wisdom in the entire book. (It’s not laid out plainly; stay alert to the clues.)
This region of southwestern Poland is called Silesia, and during World War II, it was annexed by Germany, with land and property coming into the hands of German citizens. After the war, the border with Germany was shifted back westward, and the Germans who’d moved there were moved back. This swinging over and back is a regular theme, in all its varied guises; the title suggests it, as well.
Since this is not a detailed analysis, but a simple review, I will simply report that it is replete with possible philosophical approaches to the universe, even going to far as to contain, in the words of the unnamed narrator, a detailed Greek philosophy of two warring cosmic forces, chthonos, the generative, out-of-control procreative urge, and chaos, the force of destruction and decay. In the middle, like the eye of a hurricane, is the happy and well-balanced chronos. Compare and contrast this scheme with Marta’s statement about all the world’s creatures spending half their lives in the dark, and half in light. So, House of Day, House of Night, is a lumpy, delicious gravy, hinting at answers to difficult, head-scratching questions. It contains laugh-out-loud moments and sober moments of reflection. It is a book of bifurcation.
But mostly it’s another triumph from Nobel and International Booker Prize-winning Olga Tokarczuk. Set out on your own adventure and take it up right away.
Iida Turpeinen’s first novel goes deeply into 18th Century scientific practices, treating historical people and events vividly, bringing her readers to a shipwreck in the Aleutian islands, a murderous winter in Siberia, and finishing off at the Baltic Sea coast near 1950s Helsinki. She recounts the tragically wrong-headed beliefs about wildlife husbandry prevalent during the 1700s, the too-late discovery that extinction is a real thing, and concludes with a latter-day example of a heroic quartet of brothers who save a Finnish island near Helsinki from overhunting. Her account contains reliable information on official policy, and is vivid and effective while rendering her characters’ flaws, beliefs, and motivations. It’s a very affecting piece.
Her cast includes renowned naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, documenter of at least nine different species, eight of which bear his name (Steller’s Jay, Steller’s Sea Eagle, Steller’s Sea Lion, to name only a few). Prominent roles are also played by Anna, the put-upon wife of J.H. Furuhjelm, the last governor of the Russian America colony (Alaska); Professor Alexander von Nordmann and his assistant, the illustrator Hilda Olson; and 20th Century Finnish conservator John Grönvall.
This book beats to the pulse of conservation, and its cast of characters all reflect beliefs and attitudes of the time toward wildlife and the natural world. Steller discovers the Sea Cow in 1741, while on an island in the Bering Sea. By 1769, this gentle giant has breathed its last. Twenty-eight years! That’s all it took for the planet’s best hunters to slaughter it out of sight. It was docile, sluggish, and apparently delicious, although only roughly a fifth were taken for consumption. The rest? For furs, perhaps.
As the Eighteenth Century turned to the Nineteenth, prominent scientists like Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt warned of the disastrous results of untrammeled human exploitation of the natural world. This brought to the public consciousness the actual danger inherent in waste and bloodthirstiness, though perhaps not prominently enough.
In spite of its subject, Beasts of the Sea has an engaging manner, perhaps even a charm to recommend it. Take it up if your interest runs to cultural and scientific shifts in our approach to the natural world. But also, you will experience a moment in time when naturalists were often celebrities, and when, in the wake of discovering thrilling fossils, the hunt for dinosaurs began in earnest.
Posts
