Primeval and Other Times

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It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests Himself within time and its transformations. If you don’t know “where” God is – and people sometimes ask such questions – you have to look at everything that changes and moves, that doesn’t fit into a shape, that fluctuates and disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances of the sun’s corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting and glaciers moving, rivers flowing to the sea, seeds germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus developing in its mother’s belly, wrinkles near the eyes, a body decaying in the grave, wines maturing, or mushrooms growing after a rain. apples in the basement, the steam of boiled potatoes fogging up the windows, and a pantheon of slovenly Slavic gods who take their time to attend the political, natural, and

As we do in life, Tokarczuk’s characters try to solve the problem of their existence by analyzing the signs and symbols available to them, and Jung—whom Tokarczuk, a former therapist, names as an inspiration—is never far away. So one character, Rachel Szenbert, an innocent Jew from Jeszkotle, is shot with her baby while trying to escape the Germans; another, the aristocrat Squire Popielski goes mad. Captain Gropius, Kurt’s senior officer, speaks as a Nazi would. (“Look at them, Kurt, they’re not so bad after all. I even like the Slavs. Do you know that the name of this race comes from the Latin word sclavus, a servant? This is a nation with servility in its blood . . ..”) These are not Ur-characters exactly, but each draws on some aspect of type.

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Dio, il tempo, gli uomini e gli angeli (in Italian). Translated by Belletti, Raffaella. Rome: Edizioni e/o. 1999. ISBN 978-88-7641-387-2. Pravijek i ostala vremena (in Croatian). Translated by Mioč, Pero. Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Matice hrvatske. 2001. ISBN 978-953-185-049-0. I thought Drive Your Plow was a good attempt to go mainstream, Flights was completely amazing and relevant, and this one, originally published in 1996, is one of the most haunting novels I have ever read. Everyone suffers during the First World War, even the Squire, but even he lives on a different plane. The older Squire Popielski became, the more terrible the world seemed to him.

I turned on the TV Sunday afternoon, and the more the night drew on, the more I heard words like nation, victim, mystical coincidence, sign, accursed place, true patriotism, Katyn, truth. Politicians who only a few days ago were at each other’s throats are now speaking, in trembling voices, of “deep meaning” and “the metaphysics of Katyn.” Not much more than 20 years ago, some of these same people suppressed the truth about the deaths at Katyn to follow the Communist Party line. People think madness is caused by a great, dramatic event, some sort of suffering that is unbearable. They imagine you go mad for some reason. . . People also think madness strikes suddenly, all at once, in unusual circumstances, and that insanity falls on a person like a net, fettering the mind and muddling the emotions. The story begins in 1914 and runs through to the ‘modern era’ (possibly the 1980s), and life in Primeval is related through a series of short sections, each entitled ‘The Time of X’, with X being the focus of that section. Most follow the people of the region, with some characters constantly reappearing and others just given one moment in the sun. However, some feature inanimate objects (such as the church’s icon of the Virgin Mary, or a game that the local squire becomes obsessed with), and some even revolve around nature (e.g. the trees, and the mushroom network lying beneath the forest floor). It all makes for an intriguing, somewhat confusing story of a place, told by observing everything – living, dead and everything in-between. half-blind cat. Olga Takorczuk has created a multi-layered, imperfect, brutal and whimsical world to take apart and put together again. There is so much beauty within: fermenting Written in a straightforward prose, the stories span human actions and reactions, showing the inner workings of a community, the interactions between people, causes and effects, and beliefs and desires. For instance, “The Time of Genowefa” begins in 1914 when Genowefa’s husband Michał is suddenly taken away to fight in the Russian army. Misia is born while her father, Michał, is away at the war. (Misia is an adult with her own children when Primeval becomes the front during the Second World War.) As a child, Misia watched her father returning: “[her] first memory was the sight of the ragged man on the road to the mill. Her father staggered as he walked, and then often cried at night, . . .” and her father brought the grinder home from the war:the Drina. The author is the village's chronicler and documents what she feels is worthy of retelling, combining fact and fiction to serve her own myth-making Primeval is a kind of "tale," with its emphasis on structure, repetition, and archetype, where collective tradition (in this case, I was intrigued by the transformation of characters and indeed what might change a character’s life, and thus story, such as Florentynka who is an old woman living alone with her dogs and the explanation of her circumstances becomes part of the myth-making effect: Oer en andere tijden (in Dutch). Translated by Lesman, Karol. Breda: De Geus. 1998. ISBN 978-90-5226-558-2. Another of the threads is his granddaughter Adelka who leaves Primeval in the 1970s carrying the same coffee grinder in her luggage. I liked the circularity of the story of the round coffee grinder within the square frame of the larger story.