Celia recommends Primeval and Other Times and Flights by Olga Tokarczuk:

Prior to being awarded the Man Booker International Prize for the recent translation of her novel Flights, Olga Tokarczuk, while famous in her native Poland, was mostly unknown in the US. Which is why I was so thrilled, after hearing the results of the Booker International, to find that we also had a translation at Malvern of Tokarczuk’s earlier novel, Primeval and Other Times, published by Twisted Spoon Press. Both novels are fascinating and accomplished, but as I read them (back to back, I should add) I was especially impressed by the range of Tokarczuk’s artistic vision, which has produced two amazing and rigorous but also extremely different novels.

Primeval and Other Times is set in the imaginary village of Primeval. Bordered by a forest, two other villages, and a larger, bustling town that’s just near enough that the residents can travel there to buy vodka, Primeval is isolated, forgotten, it seems, by time. At the beginning of the story, the First World War has just begun. The men are gone, the women make do, easily enough, on their own. A farmer’s wife, Genowefa, is pregnant. It seems she will stay pregnant for years, until the war is over, until her husband comes home, finally, remembering the war outside of Primeval as a kind of dream, a nightmare land that may or may not have ever existed.

This is Primeval: an enclosed snow globe, a world in itself, which it may or may not be possible to ever leave. Outside, wars rise and then break like waves, disgorging soldiers and refugees through the border of Primeval, whose residents are swept up in the flood without always being entirely certain whether the outside world really exists. In one of the novel’s most eerie and strange passages, Ruta, the daughter of a destitute prostitute, gives this speech:

This is where Primeval ends, there’s nothing beyond here…[Travelers] set off on a journey, they reach the boundary, and here they come to a standstill. Maybe they dream they’re traveling onwards, that Kielce or Russia are there. My mother once showed me some of those who looked like they’d turned to stone. They stand on the road to Kielce. They don’t move, their eyes are open and they look terrible. As if they’re dead. Then, after a while, they wake up and go home, and they take their dreams for memories.

History, in this novel that spans the bulk of the twentieth century, is a thing that happens elsewhere, a dream that, like Goya’s Sleep of Reason, gives birth to monsters. And yet, as much as the town of Primeval is devastated, over and over, by history, there is also a counter dream, full of creaturely magic and wonder, in which an immortal mushroom kingdom sleeps beneath the forest, a woman feuds with the moon, a flowering vine fathers a child with a wood woman, a forgetful and tempestuous angel watches (as best it can) over a farmer’s daughter, and maybe, just maybe, there may be a way out.

If Primeval and Other Times is a snow globe, a crystal ball in which wonderful and terrible visions appear, Flights is a network of neurons, a fragile map that might not be immediately recognizable as a system, but which is constantly transmitting impulses, stories, quick bursts of scenes. It claims to be about travel and the body, but a better description might be: what does a body look like in movement? What are its transitions, the way it’s constantly disintegrating and being born? Tokarczuk is inspired by Frederik Ruysch, the eighteenth-century anatomist who used his experimental embalming techniques to create macabre works of art—infant skeletons dining together atop a hill of preserved gall bladders, a perfect, pink child’s arm, in lace sleeve, floating in a preserving jar—and also by the modern Bodies and Body Worlds exhibits, which used plastination to preserve a wide array of human bodies and internal organs. In Flights, Tokarczuk traces a winding genealogy of these preserved bodies, pausing on Philip Verheyen, the Dutch anatomist who discovered the Achilles tendon while dissecting his own leg (to which he also writes anguished letters, afflicted by phantom pain from the amputation), and the fictional Dr. Mole, a genteel kind of mad scientist who, on his death bed, leaves in his study a life-like preserved cat, which, when opened to display its internal organs, plays a cheerful tune.

Interspersed with these passages are stories of people in transit: the biologist who specializes in the eradication of invasive species, who returns to her native Poland to find it changed beyond recognition; the housewife who walks away from her home and rides the subway for days on end, looking for salvation, or at least the compassion of religion; the lonely “travel psychologist,” who sets up lectures in airports, to ask, again and again: who are we, once we’ve sloughed off the structure of family, city, country, culture? Who are we when we’re somewhere else? “Each of my pilgrimages aims at another pilgrim,” Tokarczuk writes, over and over again, a kind of refrain. There are pilgrims of the globe and of the body, those who look outwards and those who look within. Throughout, Tokarczuk’s style is rigorous, analytical: disassemble, Tokarczuk seems to say. Abandon, leave behind, remove. Here is one glimpse into a life, as in a cabinet of wonders (another motif that appears over and over again in Flights). Do you really need more than the artifact itself? Or does this preserved lung, this fragment of overheard conversation, this formula for the plasticization of organic tissue, tell enough of a story?

Of the two novels, I think my favorite is Primeval and Other Times. Reading them back to back, I was mostly astounded by how two such different and successful works could come from the same author. There are traces of Primeval’s hallucinatory style in Flights, but for the most part, Tokarczuk seems to desire that the second novel be an exercise in analysis, that it hold the reader a little bit at arm’s length, the better to experience the unknowability of the body, and of the human consciousness that inhabits it. But, whatever a given reader’s preference is, I think we can all agree to eagerly await the next translation of a Tokarczuk novel—which, by the way, will be an ecological murder mystery called Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, released in the US next month.