Reviews

Daghus, natthus by Olga Tokarczuk

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nadijya's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

sidharthvardhan's review against another edition

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4.0

"But then words and things do form a symbiotic relationship, like mushrooms and birch trees. Words grow on things, and only then are they ripe in meaning, ready to be spoken aloud. Only then can you play with them like a ripe apple, sniff them, taste them, and lick their surface before snapping them in half and inspecting their bashful, succulent insides. People are like words in this way too - they cannot live without being attached to a place, because only then do they become real. Maybe this is what Marta meant when she said something that struck me as odd at the time: 'If you find your place you'll be immortal.'"

A bit like Flights in that it contains several stories barely or, at times, not at all connected. The theme though seems opposite - Flights was about people who loved traveling and preferred it over homes. The distincion between the two types has been pointed in both the books. This one, as the title would suggest, is about the others - to whom the house may as well their larger body as Gibran quote in the beginning:

"Your house is your larger body. It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless.
Does not your house dream? And dreaming, leave the city for grove or hilltop?"
Gibran

In fact, there is a story about a monk who wrote the story of the female said who grew beard - this monk of medival has troubles with his sexuality seeming to take the body as the smallest house relation. (Though there was a story about anatomy in Flights too).

'Have you ever thought about the fact that inside your body it's completely dark?' he asked her, as they lay curled up together on the mattress. The light can't shine through your skin. Down there, where men enter you, it must be dark too. Your heartworks in the darkness, just like all your other organs.'

The central story is about a woman talking about homely things - pickles, maintaining houses, neighbors, listening to radios, indigenious plants, local cults food receipies etc. One of ways you know OT is a genuis in her art is when you see she illustrate the feeling of two people 'at home' in each other's company not by showing them in lively conversations but rather in a tranquil silence:

"The silence that has sown itself between us grows up all around us, hungrily devouring our space. There's no air left to breathe. And the longer we stay silent, the more impossible it becomes to say anything at all, the more remote and less important all kinds of topics seem to be. This sort of silence is velvety, warm, dry and silky, nice to touch. But sometimes I've been afraid Marta might
not feel the same way as me and might lash out at that silence of ours with a thoughtless 'Well , yes . . .' or 'That's how it is . . .' or even an innocent sigh. And then this worry starts to ruin my enjoyment of the silence, because without wanting to I become its sentry, and at the same time i ts prisoner, and I tense myself up, bristling in readiness for the moment when this smooth and wonderful atmosphere, so simple and natural, will become unbearable and finally come to an end. And then what shall we say to each other? But Marta always proves wiser than I. Without a sound she gets up and wanders off to her rhubarb patch, or to the wigs she keeps in cardboard boxes, and the mutual silence that we have cultivated together trails after her, growing even more intense. Then I'm left alone in the midst of it, two-dimensional and featureless, only half existing, as if in a drawn-out moment of revelation."

There is a story about border guard - borders have a lot to do in her books ... perhaps counties might be seen as homes ... and cults too because, as with Flights, OT talks about cults too. And there is a story of infidel wife which seems to be in there just to clarify that even if you have a perfectly satisfied life at home, you might yearn for the world (wife's lover was a traveller).

And your home is not only in place but in time:

"The velvet foot is a mushroom that grows in winter. From October to April it lives on dead trees. It smells wonderful and tastes delicious. It's hard not to spot it, because it's as yellow as honey. But no one gathers mushrooms in winter. There's a general consensus that the mushroom-picking season is in the autumn, so the velvet foot is like a person born too late, in the wrong era, a person to whom everything seems dead and rigid; it lives at a time when the world is over and done with for its kind. All around it can see nothing but a gloomy winter landscape, and sometimes powdery snow covers its yellow caps in white crowns. It can see the remains of other fungi - king boletus coated in white, their stalks weakened by decay, fallen birch boletus, and shelf mushrooms soggy with damp."

Besides houses and bodies, Gibran's quote also talks about dreams which is another major element. The protagonist of the main story likes to read about dreams of people shared on internet:

A dream from the internet
I was in a strange, deserted area. I knew I had lost my way. I wandered about this mournful wilderness in a constant twilight.
Now and again l came across traces of myself: my footprints, my lost lighter, my hat and my camera, and it cheered me up to realize I was walking in my own tracks. Suddenly l was standing by a stream. The grey sky was reflected in it. could see my own face - I fel t surprised, because it was a different face. My whole life l had thought l looked different. I started washing and l noticed to my dismay that the water was washing the flesh away from my face. lt didn't hun at all. My face was melting as if it were made of wax, dissolving in the water. Finally to my horror l felt bare bones beneath my fingers. At this point the terrible truth hit me - I had died, and there was no way back."

and there is another story about a woman who starts hearing/dreaming a male voice and chooses to chase travel to go seeking the man behind her voice.

"This is no reason not to believe in dreams, it finally occurred to her. They always make sense, they never get it wrong - it's the real world that doesn't live up to their perfection. Phone books tell lies, trains go in the wrong direction, the letters in the names of cities get mixed up, and people forget their own names. Only dreams are real. She thought she could hear that warm voice full of love in her left ear again."

And here is also a story about suicide. To be honest, if the unity of novel as a single story is your thing, OT might not work for you. She is a bit like Kundera, in that her stories depict a constellation of related themes. And she is really awesome when it comes to prose.

Of endings

"For some reason people are unable to imagine endings, not only the ends of momentous events, but even of the most minor ones. Perhaps the very effort of imagining something has the effect of exhausting reality; perhaps it doesn't want to be imagined, maybe it wants to be free, like a rebellious teenager, and that's why it's always different from how we imagine it, another about immigrants etc."

Of the color white

Their car was white, white as white can be. I went out on to the steps and waved at them. She was already coming towards me, peering at the steep path underfoot. The whiteness of the car provided a background for her slender profile. She came floating out of a white screen, like a figure emerging from a film and then disappearing into the darkness of the auditorium. And I was the audience. As I was looking at her and smiling, I realized that any form of whiteness is at odds With the natural order of things, and doesn't exist in nature. Even snow isn't white; it is grey, yellow, shining gold, it can be blue as the sky or dark as graphite. That's why white tablecloths and sheets rebel and insist on going yellow. as if they want to rid themselves of their unreal colour. The usual washing powders are no help - like many human inventions they just produce an illusion by reflecting light.

Of death

'If death were nothing but bad, people would stop dying immediately.'

Of Cutlers

""They had a very curious belief about how the world began - they believed that all matter is the 'affect' of the spirit: the spirit grew forgetful, slOpped concentrating and experienced something that it is not supposed lO - an affect, that is, an overpowering emotion . (The theologians later puzzled over what son of an emotion it might have been - terror perhaps, or maybe despair at the idea of existing and having no escape from existence? But there is no clear explanation.)"

"The Cutlers believed that the soul is a knife stabbed into the body, which forces it to undergo the incessant pain that we call life. It animates the body, while at the same time killing it, for every day of life takes us further away from God. I f man did not have a soul he would not suffer. He would live l ike a plant in the sunlight, l ike an animal that grazes in sunny pastures, but because he has a soul, which at the very start of its existence once looked upon G od's inexpressible radiance, everything seems dark lO him. To be a small piece c hipped off the whole, but to remember that whole, to be made for death, but to have to
live, to have been killed but to remain alive - that's what it means t o have a soul.