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[ excerpt ]
Polish writing
read more about Primeval here
also by the author:
House of Day,
House of Night
Elsewhere (anthology)
Read a story by
the author here
author events:
Wed., August 18, 6 pm
Edinburgh International Book Festival
Writers' Retreat
festival web site here
September 15-26
International Festival of Literature in Berlin
webpage
about the translator:
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is one of the leading translators of Polish literature into English. Having studied Russian and Ancient Greek at Oxford University, she has translated many works of Polish fiction into
English, among them House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk and Pawel Huelle's Mercedes-Benz and
Castorp. She is the recipient of this year's Found in Translation Award for her translation of Pawel Huelle's
The Last Supper. She lives in London.
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primeval and other times
by Olga Tokarczuk
translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Tokarczuk's third novel, Primeval and Other Times was awarded the Koscielski Foundation Prize in 1997, which established the author as one of the
leading voices in Polish letters. It is set in the mythical village of Primeval in the very heart of Poland, which is populated by eccentric, archetypal characters. The village, a
microcosm of Europe, is guarded by four archangels, from whose perspective the novel chronicles the lives of Primeval's inhabitants over the course of the feral 20th century. In prose that
is forceful and direct, the narrative follows Poland's tortured political history from 1914 to the contemporary era and the episodic brutality that is visited on ordinary village life.
Yet Primeval and Other Times is a novel of universal dimension that does not dwell on the parochial. A stylized fable as well as epic allegory about the inexorable grind of time,
the clash between modernity (the masculine) and nature (the feminine), it has been translated into most European languages.
Tokarczuk has said of the novel: "I always wanted to write a book such as this. One that creates and describes a world. It is the story of a world that, like all things living, is
born, develops, and then dies." Kitchens, bedrooms, childhood memories, dreams and insomnia, reminiscences, and amnesia — these are part of the existential and acoustic spaces
from which the voices of Tokarczuk's tale come, her "boxes in boxes."

Praise:
Primeval is a story that is historical, mystical, and philosophical simultaneously. The characters are very real, and their lives and experiences captivating.
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— Krakow Post
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... curious and moving book.
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— The Independent
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It is here, amongst these dense forests, that the sphere of the sacred blends with the profane, as mystical phenomena, Catholicism, holiness and
spirituality intertwine with the everyday. A microcosm of Polish towns of the period, Primeval is to Tokarczuk what Visegrad was to Ivo Andric in The Bridge over
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 purpose.
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— Richard Jackson, KGB Lit Magazine
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Opening the book was like finding a time-worn matryoshka doll at an antique shop on Krakow's back streets, where I might be greeted with a cup of tea and a
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
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
supernatural needs of the inhabitants of Primeval.
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— The Literary Bohemian
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Primeval is a kind of "tale," with its emphasis on structure, repetition, and archetype, where collective tradition (in this case,
Central European Judeo-Christianity) provides the gloss to aspects of the text left unwritten. Characters move in and out, some appearing only briefly, and
yet we are meant to—and do—see them as full, round beings, with sensible motivations and unique psychologies.
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— Tara Bray Smith, Words without Borders
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[The novel] recounts the hard passage of an imaginary village through a
century of conflict, distant coups and decay. Centre-stage, however, are the village's
colourful characters: an aristocrat who withdraws from life to play a rabbi's fantastical
board game promising answers to life's great questions; a dog-loving madwoman pursued by the
moon; a Soviet soldier who seeks sexual relief among forest beasts; a priest who wishes to
tame a frog-infested river. Overlooking all is a vain selfish God who has become thoroughly
bored with mankind and who must play second fiddle in Ms Tokarczuk's pantheistic world to
material things: a sprawling mushroom root which links all matter together or a wooden
coffee-grinder with which a young girl mills out time.
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— The Economist
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Primeval and Other Times is small but epic, in the same way that, say, that a short story by Faulkner
or Nabokov is epic. ... Into the bucolic lives of the people of Primeval comes The Great War, the Depression, World War II, the Nazi
occupation, then the Russians. Life is less than bucolic, but even amidst the sounds and alarums of war and invasion, the author
leavens all with a touch of softness and mysticism. ... a singular work of beauty, translated with no little art.
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— RALPH
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In Primeval, shape-shifting elements of nature coexist seamlessly with a character taming snakes into
peaceful domesticity by the hearth, Nazi concentration camps, and God grieving his unrequited love for man within a mystical
labyrinth of eight spheres or worlds. It's well worth the long visit.
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— Booklist
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Tokarczuk is a painter of words and dreams who writes with meaning. She challenges readers to question/discover the
layers of God, story, and characters' souls through symbolism, mentions of authentic Polish Easter customs, and vignettes featuring the
complex labyrinth journey game of life choices divided into eight worlds/spheres.
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— NewPages
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Trained as a psychologist and inspired by Jungian theory, Tokarczuk writes novels that are at once
realistic, mythic, folkloric, poetic and post-modern. The diction of Primeval and Other Times is deceptively flat and
seemingly simplistic, like that of a well-known fairytale. But each vignette, each "short clip" adds another layer of
perception.
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— Belletrista
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Primeval and Other Times is an overtly philosophical book, but not a polemical one. Tokarczuk allows various strains of philosophical
thought to surface through her characters: Optimism, nihilism, determinism, and free will coexist without privilege, and though we may be sermonized by the
preacher, his words have no more authority than any of the other characters we meet. Furthermore, since the philosophy we encounter in the book arises
organically from the lives of the townspeople, it never feels unanchored or purely intellectual.
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— Angela Demarco, Bookslut
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From odds and ends of real history Tokarczuk builds a myth, i.e., a
history with a rigid order, where all the events, including the bad and tragic ones, have
their reasons for happening. She organizes space according to the model of the mandala —
a circle drawn inside a square, which is the geometrical image of perfection and completion.
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— Jerzy Sosnowski, Gazeta Wyborcza
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In this epic novel Olga Tokarczuk has drawn on the tradition of magic realism to create a world permeated with
ancient myths as much as it is firmly rooted in the present.
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— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
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The author draws the reader into a sadistic world that is described in a language that is crystalline and
pure as water from a well. |
— De Morgen
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Olga Tokarczuk's myth of "Primeval" is far more sophisticated than it might seem. She is not satisfied with merely glossing traditional mythical narratives, and we will not find many of these in her novel. Her method is
more refined. Perhaps we would do well to recall that wonderful Polish tradition of "mythmaking," as found in the works of Bruno Schulz and Boleslaw Lesmian, where the mythical perception of the world
takes precedence over simply presenting the memes of myth, as it were, which are meant to point to readymade archetypes. Tokarczuk shows no fear in transgressing this tantalizing border, and her mythmaking is fresh
and original, while also being uncommonly consistent with her other work as well. Unlike Schulz's chaotic, fantastical mythmaking, Primeval is calming and meditative, and it differs from the writing of
Tokarczuk's generational peers who share a similar poetic vision: it eschews Andrzej Stasiuk's zeal in Tales of Galicia for replacing older myths with the modern myth of consumerism, nor does it have any of
Magdalena Tulli's complex semantics and labyrinthine mystifications. While Primeval and Other Times addresses similar questions, its approach is completely its own and, especially in a time of postmodern
experimentalism, singularly poetic.
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— Literarni noviny (Prague)
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ISBN 978 80 86264 35 6
248 pp.
141 x 205mm
softcover with flaps
fiction: novel
$15.50 / £9.90
publication dates:
UK January 2010
US April 2010
Price of €14.00 includes airmail worldwide
or order from:
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Indiebound
Powells
SPD
Central Books
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