Nowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, an area that has been a part of Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia in the past. When the narrator moves into the area, she discovers everyone and everythhing has its own story. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda from the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins the radio quiz every day to the tale of the man who causes international tension when he dies on the border, one leg on the Polish side, the other on the Czech side. Each of the stories represents a brick and they interlock to reveal the immense monument that is the town. What emerges is the message that the history of any place is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one's self and one's dreams but also with all of the universe.
Tokarczuk is an excellent storyteller ... She is very good at creating a 'sense of anticipation,' although the structure of the novel requires that she keep building momentum from a standing start ... There are other costs. Marta’s gnomic insights don’t always sound that different from the narrator’s, and since she isn’t really central to any story lines of her own, she sometimes feels like a mouthpiece for a certain kind of detached wisdom ... Occasionally, the thematic links between chapters are conveniently perfect ... Yet this is not a novel undermined by whimsy or trickery. Tokarczuk is far too good a writer not to complicate her own games ... Beautifully translated ... Every dreamlike image or detail is matched by another with the weight and ordinariness of real life ... There’s no real plot, of course, and the stories don’t point in any clear direction, yet somehow the novel does achieve a kind of deepening gravity ... So many of the games Tokarczuk plays pay off.
Should not be missed ... The style can be a bit daunting initially because everything seems only tenuously related, but it’s immensely rewarding once the stars start to align and reveal bigger themes.
It is a mesmerising showcase of Tokarczuk’s skills at blending a scrupulous attentiveness to the most humdrum detail of village life in rural Poland with startling forays into the realms of the uncanny ... She opts for a form of writing which draws the reader in by obsessively circling around certain themes – loss, obsession, enchantment, inconstancy – that gradually take on meaningful shapes in the reader’s consciousness ... The craft equivalent of Tokarczuk’s style is the art of the mosaic, the separate stones of beautifully executed microhistories that are carefully placed to make up larger patterns of significance ... Her trusted intermediary, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is the best accomplice Tokarczuk could have wished for in another triumph of the translator’s art.
