Primeval and Other Times
Tokarczuk won Poland’s Koscielski Foundation Prize with this vision of the twentieth-century in an imaginary Eastern European village consisting of four guardian angels and a range of human characters—a world apart that yet mirrors reality beyond its boundaries. Tokarczuk first describes Primeval, noting place-name derivations and remarking, It is God’s business to create, and people’s business to name. Section headings denote changes in location, time, and point of view. Focal shifts build an engrossing, multifaceted mosaic, including individuals like Cornspike, an unlikely subject for revelation, who lives in the wild; steals food; turns to whoring; suffers solitary stillbirth in an abandoned, tumbledown house; and then is blessed with a surprising epiphany when she sees the force that pervades everything and the contours of other worlds and other times. In Primeval, shape-shifting elements of nature coexist seamlessly with a character taming snakes into peaceful domesticity by the hearth, Nazi concentration camps, and God grieving his unrequited love for man within a mystical labyrinth of eight spheres or worlds. It’s well worth the long visit. --Whitney Scott