Praise:

[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.

— The Economist

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.

— Angela Demarco, Bookslut

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.

— Jerzy Sosnowski, Gazeta Wyborcza

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.

— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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

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.

— Literarni noviny (Prague)