Ryszard Koziołek on Tokarczuk's New Novel: Poland as a Bomb Hole
At first I was ashamed to find myself enjoying a novel with so much death and trauma in it. Soon, I was ashamed of my shame. What have we done to ourselves, that we no longer know how to play with literature?
By Ryszard Koziołek
Imagine three outstanding books lying in front of you, all about life emerging from the Second World War: Marcin Zaremba's Wielka trwoga (The Great Dread); Magdalena Grzebałkowska's 1945; Olga Tokarczuk's There's Too Much World. The problem isn't which one to read. All of them, of course. But someone might ask: why read fiction, when we have such well-documented and well-written scholarly accounts and nonfiction?
Those for whom history and reportage are not enough feel the need for a novel. Even if they won't learn any more of the truth from it than from the other two books. Those are more reliable, with simple structures, cited sources, and photographic documentation; they don't mislead, and they are reader-friendly. So why?
What Do We Need Novels For?
I am looking at Edvard Munch's painting Cabbage Field. Turquoise-green rows, flanked on the left by the warm yellow of grain and on the right by the rotten-green rectangle of a stubble field, stretching all the way to a dark horizon. Exactly half of the cabbages have already been pulled up. I understand the painting's symbolic content: soon I myself will be a pulled-up cabbage; at most, the place in the earth where one once grew. That depresses me, and yet I feel and think: beautiful! Am I saying it to the painting, or to whatever in me has, thanks to it, found its voice?
