![]() These absent Germans make up one of the many recurring motifs of the book. They are Poles who, after the war, left the old Polish lands of the east - the newly Sovietised territories of Belorussia and Lithuania - and took up residence in the west, occupying houses that had just been vacated by Germans fleeing to the new borders of post-Nazi Germany. Villagers can hear Czech discos are watched by Czech border guards the short cut into town takes them through Czech territory. This being Poland, the village's history is by no means straightforward. In no particular order she pieces together the stories of the local community and the wider history that informs them. The narrator arrives to live with her husband, R, in a small village in the west of Poland. It is not so much a novel as a collection of linked short narratives, found stories, hagiography and incidental observations and is a delight to read - wonderfully inventive and by turns comic, tragic and wise. With House of Day, House of Night, her first full-length work here, Olga Tokarczuk can rightfully take her place among these writers. ![]()
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