Olga Tokarczuk - House of Day, House of Night (Fitzcarraldo, 2025) ****½

Every book by Olga Tokarczuk is a delight, and so is this one. Like "Flights", it's difficult to call this book a novel. It's a series of short stories, musings and insights, concentrated around her house in the country, the village, its neighbours and the surrounding nature. 

There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology.

She writes with equal interest about the rhubarb of Marta, her next door neighbour, as about the Greek philosopher Archemanes, a teacher of Pythagoras.

A red line throughout the book is the legend of Saint Kummernis, who is depicted as Jesus on the cross, with bare breasts and a beard. The young woman had to take refuge in a convent to escape a marriage that had been arranged by her father, a baron. In sacred icons she will be portrayed with bare breasts and a beard, because actually Jesus gave her his head to redeem her body from her earthly condition and from her awe of her father.

Her life is being written by young monk named Paschalis, whose greatest desire is to become a woman. He is allowed to reside in a small separate building inside the Benedictine nunnery. 

Tokarczuk juggles with her source material, brilliantly, effortlessly, creating surprises, intellectual interest and bizarre aspects of our humanity. Her stories oscillate between reality and fiction, between the conscious and the subconscious, between legend and history. 

As I said, a delight to read.