Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, 62, was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 2018, the same year that she won the International Booker for her fragmentary novel , cited by the judges for its “wit and gleeful mischief”. Annie Proulx has compared her to WG Sebald; for the , her 900-page historical epic (translated by Jennifer Croft in 2021) stands alongside “the great postmodern meganovels by Pynchon or Perec, Bolaño or García Márquez”. Tokarczuk, via the interpreter Marta Dziurosz, was speaking from Wrocław, Poland about her new novel, , set amid creepy goings-on at a sanatorium before the first world war.
The idea occurred to me many years ago but I was deeply engaged in and this funny sort of pastiche novel had to wait, even though I often work on different books at the same time and was also writing [2009] on top of everything else. What actually helped was the pandemic: after all my travels because of the Nobel, I had the chance to return home to my nest in the forests of Lower Silesia. I have a love-hate relationship with that book.
I’ve read it five or six times since I was a teenager and every time I read it differently – it grows with the reader. What struck me was my exclusion from the novel as a reader, and a person, from the questions it asked and the answers it gave. It made me realise that when I stood in front of my father’s bookshelves as a girl – at home it was my father who was dealing with books – a huge majority of the classic nove.