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.
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.
Mercurial, mosaic-like ... Full of death, destruction and dreams ... Packed with chewy philosophical ideas and spellbinding images, but with so many descriptions of death it’s not for the faint-hearted, or anyone who isn’t already a Tokarczuk fan. It’s dense and often referred to as her most difficult work.
A constellation novel: a mosaic of stories, myths, gossip, anecdotes, philosophical reveries and even recipes ... Alongside history and memory, Tokarczuk explores identity, transformation, and the meaning of home. Her meditations range from the banal to the surreal ... The novel is a little baggy in places. I preferred the evocative snapshots of local characters to the meandering digressions ... Tokarczuk’s reflections are saturated with sensory language that conveys a vivid sense of the landscape and seasonal change — floods, meadow fires and gales.
