In Review: Olga Tokarczuk's 'House of Day, House of Night'

By Joseph Coward

It is possible that a long time ago you read Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night in the same language in which you are reading this review. But until recently, a search for further information about the novel would have turned up few results; you certainly wouldn't have been able to buy a replacement for your old copy. This is because House of Day, House of Night was published in Polish in 1998, translated into English in 2002, then went out of print and stayed there for the next twenty-three years. It seems inconceivable that a book by a writer of Tokarczuk's calibre could fall by the wayside like this, especially since the English version of the novel was so highly praised at the time: at least one broadsheet writer correctly predicted in their review that Tokarczuk would eventually win a Nobel prize. What is perhaps more odd than this carelessness, though, is that she had to wait so long to be read in English in the first place. She had been successfully publishing fiction in Polish since 1989, but this 2002 translation was her first introduction to Anglophone readers.

Tokarczuk is not alone in her untranslated purgatory. Hungarian poet and novelist Krisztina Tóth has also been writing to critical acclaim since the '80s, and yet it took until the 2010s for her work to begin appearing in English. Gabriela Adameșteanu's novel Wasted Morning was a hit in Romania in 1983, but remained untranslated until 2011. Add to this list writers like Polish Magdalena Tulli, Hungarian Magda Szabó, Czech Daniela Hodrová, and this pattern of successful women writers excluded from translation for so long seems bizarre and, once the connection is made, hard to ignore. 

Westerners' stereotypical expectations of literature from the former Soviet Union could be to blame. Perhaps English-language readers expect a certain machismo in narratives about witnessing and rejecting communism, a maleness not present in women's narratives, which are dismissively read as irrelevant in their perceived domesticities. (Not that men from these regions have found their way into English with ease, either: even the work of recent Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai was not available in English for the first three decades of his career.) Add to this the gendered hierarchies of an Anglophone literary culture already under-representing women and a vague notion that works in translation are themselves 'serious' and somehow therefore male—it is small wonder that women in translation have been so delayed.

A more likely culprit is the reluctance of major publishers: just three percent of major houses' output is work originally in languages other than English. A recent in-translation boom did not occur because the big four finally saw sense, but because independents like Fitzcarraldo (Tokarczuk's UK publisher), Dalkey Archive and Seven Stories have found the wherewithal to fill the gap. 

But if it takes such a concerted effort to translate a novel by a Nobel laureate outside of the publishing mainstream, then what chance do lesser-known novelists have? Not that Tokarczuk needed translation to be successful – the Nobel was not awarded due to her presence on the English-speaking market. Still, making such brilliant literature available to western readers is not an unreasonable demand.

In any case, the eventual reemergence of House of Day, House of Night, whether due to independents' vanguardism or commercial publishers coming to their senses, is particularly pleasing because it demonstrates the endurance of Tokarczuk's genius. In this 1998 novel, we already see what was to become known, decades later, as the Tokarczukian style: the formally restless, the weird, the violent, the expansive, all of which are expressions of Tokarczuk’s deep-rooted connection to her home. 

A woman moves with her husband from the city to the countryside in a Poland still binding its war wounds at the end of the 20^th century. A man policing the Polish-Czech border hallucinates while lost in the snow; a medieval monk wishes to become a woman; a woman dreams a man into her waking life; a man appears standing in his neighbour’s bedroom at night, despite having been dead for several days. In House of Day, House of Night, these disparate lives mingle in stories half-remembered, half-dreamed by the woman new to the village. As different as these 'constellations' are, they all share a curious concern with the boundary. Between the urban and rural; between nations, genders, dreaming and waking, life and death. 

And through Tokarczuk's beautifully folkloric and elliptical style, these boundaries begin strangely to elide. As the characters collide, so too do the novel's forms. In an extraordinary final story told by the unnamed protagonist to her husband, R, the novel's realist grimness of post-war Poland becomes a sad fairytale. Throughout the novel, Tokarczuk repeatedly finishes stories suddenly, unclearly, or even with alternative endings: in one version of the monk's story, he travels the world; in another, he hangs himself in his cell. But these confounding endings do not read as indifference or even ambivalence. Rather, Tokarczuk presents a reality in which people may live many lives simultaneously, the possibilities extravasating strangely into one another.

It seems fitting that a novel full of such uncannily atemporal stories was almost lost to English readers. Its going in and out of print serves as a reminder of the fragility of text: it is not in the ether but on the page; language is finite and material. As Woolf cheerily reminds us, 'the very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.' But, in the meantime, one hopes that it won't take the highest literary honours to save works from going out of translation and obscurity, especially with regard to women writers whose work is already so sought after and lauded elsewhere. As Tokarczuk’s constellations remind us, what vanishes can also return: stories have a habit of slipping across borders and may find new forms of life.

JOSEPH COWARD is a writer and a University of London PhD candidate.

Art by Constance Chapman