Opowiadania bizarne by Olga Tokarczuk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"He has a feeling of strange suspension like in the childhood, when the spaces around him had not yet been filled with meanings and each event seemed unique and nonrecurring."
[My own translation from the short story titled Serce (Heart)]

A few months ago I reviewed Olga Tokarczuk's Run Your Plow Through the Bones of the Dead. The great Polish writer has since received the prestigious International Man Booker Prize for Flights (Polish title Bieguni). I haven't yet read that novel but have received a copy of Tokarczuk's newest book from Poland. As far as I know, the book does not yet have an English title and it is a bit challenging, at least for me, to find a fitting one. In Polish the title is Opowiadania bizarne whose English equivalent would be Bizarre Stories, except that there is no such word in Polish as "bizarne." Ms. Tokarczuk borrowed it directly from French or English, maybe attempting to make the title sound a little peculiar. Anyway.

There are ten stories in this collection and indeed they all are wonderfully 'off-center.' To me they are kind of like literary equivalents of surrealist paintings. Some aspects of the reality that they present - not all! - have been distorted in certain ways. Almost like that famous René Magritte's picture, Time transfixed showing a locomotive, at full steam, jutting out of a fireplace - everything is superbly realistic except for the combination.

Because of my advanced age I passionately love one of the stories, titled Seams (Szwy in Polish). An elderly widower notices one morning that the socks he is putting on his feet have seams along their whole length, from toes, through the instep, to the cuff. He has never seen such socks before. He also notices that the postage stamps are round, there are no pens that write in blue, there is a 0 on the face of the clock instead of 12, etc. Alarmed, he asks a neighbor about his strange discoveries. The woman patiently explains that he must be wrong, there have never been socks without seams, stamps have always been round, things have always been like that and to calm the man's nerves she offers him home-made liqueur. I can imagine hearing the man's terrified scream "Where is my world?" His entire universe of memories is gone. His past is gone. Only his body remains in this world. It would be hard not to shed a tear reading the distressing last paragraph. The emotional impact is almost as strong as in the saddest story about human impermanence I have ever read, The Foxes Come at Night by Cees Nooteboom.

Two other stories get "honorable mentions" from me. In Transfugium Ms. Tokarczuk makes it clear that despite all the advances in technology, human loneliness and suffering is always the same. All Saints Mountain, the longest story in the collection, almost novella-size, is narrated by a renowned psychologist, author of a popular psychological test. Applied to children the test quite accurately predicts the directions of their further development. The psychologist - contracted to use her test on a group of children housed in seclusion in Swiss Alps - is lodged in a convent, serviced by a group of nuns. Ms. Tokarczuk offers gorgeous visuals but the tale makes quite an unexpected detour into religious territory and the author amuses the reader with odd ideas such as 'manufacturing of saints' and trade in holy people's relics.

While some of the other stories do not seem to convey a particular moral or ethical message or alert the reader to the world's injustices and bleakness of human condition they demonstrate the power of literature in building surrealistic yet internally consistent worlds in the stories.

Three-and-three-quarter stars.


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