24 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019
Wilgefortis wanted to become a nun,
but her father kidnapped her from a
convent and tried to force her to marry.
She prayed to Jesus to make her repel-
lent to the would-be groom and was
rewarded with masculine features and
a beard that resembled Christ’s—at
the sight of which her father had her
put to death.
“Who was the person who wrote the
life of the saint, and how did he know
it all?” a character asks. As it turns out,
Paschalis—a fictional figure—is uniquely
suited to write the hagiography of this
masculine girl: from boyhood on, he has
been tormented by the desire to become
a woman. Like the region in which the
story takes place, with its ever-shifting
national borders, both characters in-
habit a liminal state, which seems to
enhance their capacity for empathy.
In its juxtaposition of memoir, fic-
tion, and myth, the novel was Tokarczuk’s
first attempt at the constellation form
she later used in “Flights.” The latter
novel grew out of the fact that, for the
first time in her life, Tokarczuk found
herself free to travel widely. Her bur-
geoning international reputation meant
invitations to literary festivals around
the world, her son was approaching
adulthood, and her marriage ended. She
became preoccupied with the idea of
writing a book about journeys, but con-
ventional travel writing seemed too lin-
ear, lacking the “nervous, even aggres-
sive, very active, very urgent” nature of
the act of travelling.
“I desperately tried to find a form
for such a book, and I couldn’t,” she told
me. But, as she began to collate her
notes, she realized that they could con-
stitute a novel. To determine the final
form, she spread out the book’s frag-
ments—a hundred and six of them—
on the floor of her workroom and stood
on a table so that she could survey them
from above.
One of those fragments concerns
Philip Verheyen, the seventeenth-cen-
tury Flemish anatomist who gave the
Achilles tendon its name. When he was
a young man, one of his legs had to be
amputated. Afterward, Verheyen expe-
rienced continual agony in the empty
space where his leg had been. What hasbeen removed—be it a limb from the
body or a group of people from a na-
tion—still has the power to hurt. “We
must research our pain,” he concludes.T
he day after Apostrof ended, To-
karczuk was having lunch at an In-
dian restaurant in Warsaw with her part-
ner of eleven years, Grzegorz Zygadło,
an affable man in his late forties with
worried eyes and a scruff of dark hair.
The results of the European Parliament
elections had come in, and they were
dispiriting. Law and Justice had won
its largest-ever share of the vote, more
than forty-five per cent, a lead of nearly
seven points over its centrist rival, the
European Coalition. Wiosna had come
in at six per cent, and would be send-
ing three representatives to Brussels.
Monika Platek, the “Radiolab” fan from
Apostrof, would not be one of them.
Zygadło used to work as a transla-
tor from German. Now his job, as he
describes it, is “taking care of Olga,”
serving as chauffeur, errand runner, re-
search assistant, and so on. She refers
to him as her “manager”; he calls her
writing “the family business.” In addi-
tion to supplying her with whatever she
might immediately require—espresso,
a copy of a book, tech support—he
sometimes stepped in, as she and I
talked, to elaborate on a point she had
made or to caution her, sotto voce, not
to be indiscreet.
Later in the afternoon, Zygadło
drove us to Wrocław, three hours away.
Their car, a Volvo station wagon, was
stuffed to the roof with suitcases, gar-
ment bags, and Tokarczuk’s beech tree
from the Apostrof festival. As we set
off, Tokarczuk tied her dreadlocks into
a knot, and reached for a bag of kale-
flavored rice crackers. Zygadło nego-
tiated the traffic with difficulty, at one
point stopping smack in the middle of
one of Warsaw’s (admittedly confus-
ing) roundabouts.
During the years that she spent re-
searching and writing her most recent
novel, “The Books of Jacob” (2014), the
two of them drove around much of Eu-
rope like this—Ukraine, Bulgaria, Ro-
mania, the Czech Republic, Germany,
Turkey—following the trail of its pro-
tagonist, Jacob Frank. (It is expected to
appear in English next year, translated
by Jennifer Croft, who also translated“Don’t feel bad, son. The people are only screaming
because they’re such big fans.”