Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, Primeval and Other Times, first published in Poland in 1996, now available in an English version after having been translated into several other languages, is already regarded as a classic of East European post-Communist fiction, winning many prizes and becoming required reading for high school students in Poland. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the Polish literary market was flooded with long censored works and translations of formerly forbidden literature from the US and Western Europe, and writers no longer had the Communist regime to push against, Tokarczuk represented a genuinely fresh current in Polish literature, taking a self-consciously woman-centered perspective and moving away from the old politics to consider the relation between cultural archetypes and the events of history. Young Poles in the 1990s read Tokarczuk eagerly in the way that Americans read novelists like Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Márquez during the previous decade. Primeval is a kind of "tale," with its emphasis on structure, repetition, and archetype, where collective tradition (in this case, Primeval and Other Times is small but epic, in the same way that, say, that a short story by Faulkner It is not easy to write about Primeval and Other Times. Blending myth and history, the book has a powerful feminine perspective, which adds a great feeling to the book. Although there is no clear plot, the story flows, and one finds other worlds to think about in each character.

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. She managed to get a passport to travel to London for a few months, where she studied English, worked odd jobs—assembling antennas in a factory, cleaning rooms in a posh hotel—and spent time in bookstores, reading feminist theory, which she hadn’t encountered in Poland. An early story, “The Hotel Capital,” is written from the perspective of a chambermaid who creates stories about the people whose rooms she cleans, based on their personal effects. “Every time I’m in a hotel,” Tokarczuk told me, looking self-consciously around the lobby, “I remember maids are people like me, that they can also write about me and about my mess in the hotel room.” 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 The setting for the novel was inspired by the village of Zagrody, located in the Kielce region, where Tokarczuk spent her childhood holidays. [10] She emphasized, however, that although the fictional village in the book owes its topography to that of Zagrody, it is a fictional locale of her own creation. Tokarczuk rejected the idea that characters in the book could be linked to real inhabitants of Zagrody, and criticised journalists who attempted to do in the late 1990s [11] In 2012, inhabitants of Staszów County organized a project to document the locations presented in the novel through photography. [10] Reception [ edit ] Primeval and Other Times ( Polish: Prawiek i inne czasy) is a fragmentary novel by Olga Tokarczuk, published by Wydawnictwo W.A.B. in 1996. [1] [2] [3]As life takes birth from the ruins of destruction, life in Primeval blooms again, gradually expanding its wings to realize its full potential. World becomes different once more, times get changed. 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. But how you help someone who has seen death, he who is seized with horror that soon he, too would change into a lifeless scrap of flesh, and that would be all that would be left of him. The realization brings tears to human eye who perhaps get blinded due to his qualities of greed and lust and unable to see that there is no birth or death- just an immortal process repeating itself time and again. And he who learns to forget would find relief. A strange image, nearly absurd in its symbolism, though in this glorious book such a claim strikes us as reasonable, even enlightening.

Tokarczuk tells a superb story of an extended family during a very difficult period in Poland. She condemns the Germans and Russians, trefl" нямаше да е дадено с "осмица трефа", а с "осмица спатия". "Можеше (Рута) да се отнася към него (Уклея) като голямо болно животно" значи, че голямото животно е Рута (от контекста става ясно, че е впиянченият Уклея). Първите три пъти "грудка пръст" ми се стори някаква особена метафоричност, но на четвъртия взех да подозирам, че става дума за "буци пръст" (вж. "грудка" в речника). За мен е изумително как при жива авторка, 62-и набор, с електронна поща, фейсбук профил и не знам какво още, вместо да я попиташ "капитан" или "полковник" е имала предвид, слагаш бележка под линия: "Евентуална грешка в оригинала. Еди-кой си първоначално е даден като полковник, а после като капитан." Паметник под черта на нежеланието нещата да се доведат до край.Everything within its dead expanse, every living thing was hapless and alone. Things were happening by accident, and when the accident failed, automatic law appeared- the rhythmical machinery of nature, the cogs and pistons of history, conformity with the rules that was rotting everywhere. Every creature was trying to huddle up to something, to cling to something, to things, to each other, but all that resulted was suffering and despair. 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 Olga Tokarczuk παρουσιάζει τη γυναίκα και τη θηλυκότητα σε όλες τις μορφές της, με όλη την ομορφιά και την ασχήμια που αυτές κουβαλάνε, μέσα σε τοπία και καταστάσεις όπου το παράξενο φως και το αδιαπέραστο σκοτάδι του Αρχέγονου εναλλάσσονται ραγ�