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Olga Tokarczuk. Dom dzienny, dom nocny. Walbrzych, Pol. Ruta. 1998. 277 pages. 25 PLN. ISBN 83-900281-9-0.
Prawiek i inne czasy. Warsaw. WAB. 1997. 269 pages. 22 PLN. ISBN 83-87021-01-6.
Olga Tokarczuk's Prawiek i inne czasy was nominated for the prestigious Polish NIKE prize for the best novel of 1997 and is currently being translated into English. It is difficult to imagine that an English title will so aptly confer the game Tokarczuk plays with the concepts of time and space and not be somehow awkward as well. In the novel, "Prawiek," which can be translated as "the long ago" or "time immemorial," is a place, a small town. "Inne czasy" refers literally to "other times" but also to other events in space, for the novel is arranged in small units, each of which is called a "czas," a unit of time or a pulsation, which can be measured only by the event which occurs within it. Indeed, Tokarczuk continues this sense of spatialized time-or temporalized space-in the...