"House of Day, House of Night" by Olga Tokarczuk

 

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.