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family lived on the school grounds, a
period Tokarczuk remembers happily.
Her father was the school librarian, and
she spent most of her time there with
him, reading whatever she could get
her hands on—poetry, Apuleius, Jules
Verne, the encyclopedia.
In her teens, Tokarczuk became aware
that much of the world was closed to
her. “Everything that was interesting
was outside of Poland,” she said. “Great
music, art, film, hippies, Mick Jagger. It
was impossible even to dream of escape.
I was convinced as a teenager that I
would have to spend the rest of my life
in this trap.”
In the fall of 1980, she went to the
University of Warsaw, to study psychol
ogy. The campus had been a German
barracks during the war, her dormitory
was near the ruins of the Jewish ghetto,
and there were still gaps along the streets
from the Nazis’ systematic destruction
of the city, in 1944. In her second year,
in response to the spread of demonstra
tions across the country, the government
declared martial law. Even now, in the
comfort of the hotel lobby, Tokarczuk
suppressed a shudder at the memory.
“For a young girl from the provinces, it
was very harsh,” she said. “There was
nothing to buy in the shops, only vin
egar and mustard on the shelves. And
despair in the air. People really were very
pessimistic. I didn’t believe that the So
viet Union would ever break down.”
After graduating, in 1985, Tokarczuk
married a fellow psychology student,
and they moved to a town not far from
Wrocław. Tokarczuk specialized in clin
ical psychology, including work with
drug addicts and alcoholics. After a few
years, she was burned out. “I’m too neu
rotic to be a therapist,” she says.
She managed to get a passport to
travel to London for a few months,
where she studied English, worked odd
jobs—assembling antennas in a factory,
cleaning rooms in a posh hotel—and
spent time in bookstores, reading fem
inist theory, which she hadn’t encoun
tered in Poland. An early story, “The
Hotel Capital,” is written from the per
spective of a chambermaid who creates
stories about the people whose rooms
she cleans, based on their personal
effects. “Every time I’m in a hotel,” To
karczuk told me, looking selfconsciously
around the lobby, “I remember maids
are people like me, that they can also
write about me and about my mess in
the hotel room.”
After Tokarczuk returned to Poland,
she and her husband had a son, and she
began to write in earnest. She credits
her training in psychology with giving
her the awareness that multiple reali
ties can coexist. One of her first clini
cal experiences involved two brothers
who had completely different emotional
narratives about their family dynamic.
“That was my first step to writing,” she
later recalled. “To write is to look for
very particular, specific points of view
on reality.”
Tokarczuk’s first novel, published in
1993, was a philosophical parable set in
seventeenthcentury France; the next
told the story of a psychic in Wrocław
in the nineteentwenties. Her first major
success came with her third, “Primeval
and Other Times” (1996), in which she
drew on stories that her maternal grand
mother told her as a child. With a touch
of magic realism—four guardian angels
watch over the proceedings—the novel
chronicles the lives of two families ina fictional Polish village through the
twentieth century. Much of it revolves
around interactions between Poles and
Jews. Poles visit Jewish doctors and
shop in Jewish stores, but the passion
ate love of a Polish woman and a Jew
ish man is thwarted. For its combina
tion of mythical elements and a long
view of history, the novel was hailed as
an innovation.
Around the same time, Tokarczuk
fell in love with the Kłodzko Valley, a
picturesque corner of Lower Silesia, by
the Czech border. She and her husband
bought a simple woodframe house and
set about fixing it up. Tokarczuk be
came fascinated by the history and cul
ture of the region. Passing a church
shortly after the move, she noticed a
statue of a saint, St. Wilgefortis, an ex
perience that formed the backbone of
her next novel, “House of Day, House
of Night,” which was published in 1998.
She writes of coming across a booklet
in the church’s souvenir shop which
contained a medieval life of the saint,
written by someone identified only as
“Paschalis, monk.” According to legend,“Would Juror No. 6 kindly please stop sighing
and saying, ‘Oh, boy, here we go again,’ every time a new
witness takes the stand?”