But the temptation to over-fill the blanks between characters is huge, which can result in a world where we know too much about too little. It allows you to see things from a broader perspective and to understand the world as myriad. Creating a world that’s larger than one character’s lived experience seems like a great idea. Linked short stories go in and out of vogue, I think, because so few people do them well. I had no idea where Tokarczuk was taking me, but I loved it and trusted her with my fragile psychic state. The tone shifts in the next section as we encounter the quotidian details of the narrator’s home and life including meeting her mysterious neighbor, Marta, a woman whose life details are as elusive of my understanding of this text. 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. Bless the books that find you at just the right time in your life.
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