About 30 pages into Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, House of day, house of night, I turned to Mr Gums and said, I have no idea what I am reading, which is unusual for me. I certainly don’t pretend to understand everything I read, but I can usually sense a book’s direction. However, something about this one was throwing me, so …
I had a quick look at Wikipedia, and found this “synopsis”:
Although nominally a novel, House of Day, House of Night is rather a patchwork of loosely connected disparate stories, sketches, and essays about life past and present in … a Polish village in the Sudetes near the Polish-Czech border. While some have labeled the novel Tokarczuk’s most “difficult” piece, at least for those unfamiliar with Central European history, it was her first book to be published in English. [Accessed: 1 October 2025]
That made me feel better! I am more than comfortable with “loosely connected disparate stories” but am only generally-versed in Central European history. So, I decided to relax and go with the flow. From that point on, I started to enjoy my reading more, but it was slow going, because the “disparate stories” demand attention. It’s not a book you whizz through for story, but one you savour for thoughts and ideas, and for the connections you find along the way.
Tokarczuk calls it, in fact, a “constellation novel”, which I understand builds on thinking by the German critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). According to academic Louis Klee, who has written on “the constellational novel”, “these novels are recognizable by the presence of a first-person narrator committed to drawing affinities and making connections among disparate things”. They can be non-linear and incorporate various forms of writing from essayistic to lyrical to fragmentary, and encourage readers to find their own connections (like finding patterns in a constellation).
This well encapsulates House of day, house of night. It comprises numerous individually titled chapters (or sections or parts), some just a few paragraphs long, and others several pages. At first it felt disjointed, but it wasn’t long before an underlying structure started to reveal itself, one held together by a first-person narrator, a woman who had come to live in a small Polish village with her partner R – just like Tokarczuk and her husband did – three years before the novel opens. She tells of life in the village, and particularly of the relationship she develops with her neighbour, a somewhat mysterious old woman named Marta, who embodies a wisdom that she sometimes shares but other times must be gleaned from what she doesn’t say.
Interspersed with our narrator’s story, are other stories – some real, some magical, some past, some present – about the region and people in it. There’s a gender-fluid monk named Paschalis who is writing the life of the female saint Kummernis. There’s the unnamed couple who think they have it all, until each is visited by the same lover, a female for “he” and a male for “she”. There’s a religious community called the Cutlers who make knives and believe that “the soul is a knife stabbed into the body, which forces it to undergo the incessant pain that we call life”. There’s the wonderfully named Ergo Sum who had tasted human flesh in frozen Siberia, where he’d been deported in 1943, and believes he is turning into a werewolf. And so on. Some of these stories continue, for several chapters, woven around our narrator’s story, while others stand alone. Some are about people who think they have life worked out, while in other stories, the people don’t have a clue.
There’s more though, because scattered through the stories are ruminations on disparate things like dahlias, nails, comets and grass allergies. And threading through it all are various motifs, usually providing segues between chapters, encouraging us to see links and to ponder their meaning for us. These motifs include dreams, names, time, death, borders, mushrooms (potentially deadly), and knives. The more you read, the more connections you see between them and the stories. Many are philosophically-based, but are not hard to understand. In other words, the challenge is not in understanding, but in how we, individually, process the links we see. You might have already noticed some in my examples above, such as the idea of identity. Even the mysterious Marta, who disappears every winter, is unsettling. Who is she really?
“people are woefully similar”
This is the sort of book you would expect of a Nobel prizewinner. The writing is simple but expressive, and is accompanied by a rich, dark, and often ironic humour. We have border guards who don’t want to deal with a dead body so they quietly shove it to the other side of the border. And Leo the clairvoyant who says “Thank God people have the capacity for disbelief — it is a truly bountiful gift from God”. That made me splutter.
Underpinning all this – the thing that gives the book its heft – is a quiet but somewhat resigned wisdom. It interrogates some big questions – our willingness (or not) to see what is happening in front of us, our relationship to place, how we comprehend time, and who we are. These are explored through universal binaries, not only the night-and-day contained in the title, but life and death, change and stasis, ripening and decay. How do we live with – and balance – these parts of ourselves, of life?
But, House of day, house of night is also set in a particular place and time, southwest Poland, just post World War 2. This area, explains the Translator in her note, was part of the German Reich until 1945, when the Allies agreed to move Poland’s borders west. Many Poles left their old lands of the east (now part of the USSR), and resettled in this once German area in the west, occupying homes left by the evacuated Germans. This specific history is also found in the book, with Polish families hopefully, greedily, digging up German treasures, for example, and Germans sadly returning to see their old places.
House of day, house of night offers no answers, but it sure asks a lot of questions – about how, or whether, we can move forward into more humane, and hence more fulfilling lives.
This brings me to the ending. I won’t spoil it – it’s impossible in a story like this anyhow – but we close, appropriately, on the idea of constellations and finding patterns, and a hope that it is possible to find a pattern that explains it all. It is deliciously cheeky. And, on that note, I will end.
Olga Tokarczuk,
House of day, house of night
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Melbourne: Text publishing, 2025 (Orig. pub. 1998; Eng trans. 2002)
298pp.
ISBN: 9781923058675
Review copy courtesy Text Publishing
Whispering Gums 
This sounds great. Thanks, Madame Gums!
I think you would really like this, Sara (this is Sara isn’t it?)
Yes, finally!
Lovely, Sara! Great seeing you again. It’s all a mystery.
Another example of your willingness to put in the hard yards, ST.
I derived interest from reading your review; but it will suffice me. 😉
Fair enough MR … I get that completely. I’d love to share some more thoughts from it but next week will be busy so who knows.
This does sound good and thank you for explaining how it is put together. It’s good to know beforehand that this will be a ‘go with the flow’ reading experience. I hope to get to it soon….also good to know that this actually her first novel. I do like to start a new-to-me authors books at the beginning (I have 3 of her books on my TBR, and now I can say I was wiating for her debut book to be translated in English to start my journey 😀 )
Haha Brona … good excuse but it was translated in 2002! Seriously though, it’s great that Text is republishing it out here. I think you will enjoy it though you might take even longer than I did if you go off researching everything you come across, like Kummernis, for a start!!!
I’m always at sea with saints and martyrs at the best of times, but when they have vastly different names in different countries how’s a girl to keep on top of such things 😅
BTW I had to check what I wrote. It’s not her debut novel, just the first of hers to be published in English. I think since it was translated at least one earlier one has been, Primeval and other times. Text don’t appear to have done it so you could say that this one I’ve reviewed is her first published in English by Text!
Thanks for clarifying.
This sounds extraordinary. Adding it to my list. Thanks for your excellent review!
Thanks Susan … it is. I guess that’s to be expected from a Nobel Prize winner.
This sounds very powerful I have yet to read Tokarczuk.
It is Cathy, but in a thoughtful and generous way.
I love Tokarczuk! I have not read this one though. The first one of hers I read was Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and I’ve read her two books since then. One of these days I will get around to reading this and her other ones I have missed.
Oh that’s great Stefanie because I haven’t heard from many who have read her. Drive your plow over the bones of the dead sounds excellent. From what I’ve read, it’s probably the one I’d read next. I think. There’s one called Flights which sounds good too, but I would be interested in any of her work I think.
I bet you would. Her last book, Empusium, is a riff on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain only much shorter. I am now doing a very slow read of Mann’s book which I think I am enjoying much more because of Tokarczuk.
Had you read Mann first? I haven’t do wonder whether I would need to?
I did not read Mann first. You don’t need to. I decided to read Mann afterwards.
Great … thanks Stefanie. I know I should read his. Sounds like her book could provide the impetus. I will add this to my list.
This sounds really interesting but given I struggled with Chinese Postman which was also a collection of what appeared at the start to be disparate thoughts and snippets of life I might leave it a while 🙂
Would you believe I am reading Chinese Postman now, Rach, and I thought to myself what a synchronicity! (It’s for my reading group otherwise I may not have chosen to read them quite so closely together.) They are quite different but there’s a loose similarity as well because neither is a traditional narrative, as you know.
No way! That is funny – will be so interested to hear what you and your group think of it. I think for my book club, we had about 20 people come, but only 5 people had managed to finish it and of them, it was really mixed, we had one lady say it was the best book she had ever read, and others that kept going through the struggle. Perhaps if I wasn’t working I would invest more time in getting through such a book, but I feel that I love the escapism of books and if I have to work too hard at it, I tend to give it away for something more enjoyable!
Oh my Rach, 20 people? I will be interested too to see what my group makes of it. I am in fact enjoying it, perhaps because I’m not far behind him in age – albeit I’m a woman – and am enjoying his reflections on life and aging, as well as his long perspective on things like war. And I’m fascinated about how he has strutted the voice. So, I sort of understand the one who said it was the best book she’d ever read. I probably wouldn’t say that, because I never say something like that, but so far, I do think it’s truly interesting.
I like the idea that you had to give yourself a quick lesson on theory for it to begin to make sense to you. I like the idea of being stretched. I can’t think now what was the last really ‘difficult’ book I read.
Thanks Bill … I’d love to know what you thought of this though it’s a bit different from your current African and Canadian reading!
She and Annie Ernaux are both in my mind as possible reading projects for next year. (I don’t think I can access all of the works by either author, but I have the idea that I want to read “a few”, at least.)
Me too … particularly Annie Ernaux as I’ve not read any snd really would love to.
For me, enjoyment of a book like this would absolutely depend on honest advertising. I absolutely loath when publishers try to turn something more experimental into a novel. Not only have I been tricked in a way, but now I’m entering the story with the wrong mindset. One novel that comes to mind is called Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, which is NOW marketed as, “A girl with drug-induced ESP and an eerie connection to Patty Reed… searches for her disappeared foster sister along ‘The Highway That Eats People’….” However, back in the day, this novel was described as a vampire junkie novel. I mean…. And what really happened was the author wrote a novel and then cut up the sentences and rearranged them higgledy-piggledy. *SIGH*
I did notice that you published seven posts about the Canberra Writer’s Festival over the last two days. I don’t think I have time to read all of them! 😵💫
First … I give you permission not to read all the Festival posts Melanie! They are really my record and will have interest maybe to people who went to the festival or Australians interested in those writers. So I won’t be offended!
I guess it’s not the publishers’ problem so much as the fact that authors are trying to explore writing in different ways. Some of them get bored with writing the same way, but I think many are toying with ways of really saying what they want to say. If publishers publish such a work they have to find ways of describing it but I think a novel can be experimental. So I don’t think calling it a novel is wrong? Ulysses is a novel. I think there is a bit of buyer beware in this? If we are buying or borrowing a book we need to have done our research. That said I know we can be misled by what sounds like false advertising. Mostly I know from the description or from my knowledge of the author that a book is going to be different!
And what did Mr. Gumzzzz say–“Well, by all means then, toss it into the fire.”–then the room was filled with the sound of the fireplace grate being shifted to one side. (I often express that sort of confusion to Mr. BIP as well, with no idea what he’s supposed to do about it. heheh)
Haha, Marcie – I can’t recollect as it took me so long to read and write up his response is list in the mists of time? He probably wondered why I’d persevere except he knows by now why!!
Exactly! 🙂
Hi Sue, just finished House of Day and House of Night. I loved it, once I found myself totally involved with the characters and what would happen next. It made me think of where I grew up, and the stories that could be told about the various characters who lived there.
Thanks Meg. It’s a great book once you realise what it’s about – by which I mean the tack she is taking, the overall structure of it – isn’t it. I love that it made you think about characters in your life growing up.
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