Where Dark Meets Light

Revolution and change are integral concepts in the literary sphere. Over time, literature has undergone exponential transformation, thanks in part to a select group of writers who refuse to conform to literary norms. With indomitable courage, they push the boundaries of what writing can do and accomplish. They understand that literary conventions are rarely set in stone. Their innovation and ambition lead them to deconstruct literature and rebuild it from the ground up. Writers are no strangers to deviating from the norm and experimenting with form and content. This can, however, make or break a body of work. The result is not always as expected. The grandeur of the ambition can weigh heavily on certain elements of the story. While the intention may be present, the execution sometimes falls short of the story’s potential. The output may not always be perfect, but it consistently offers a unique reading experience.

The recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, Olga Tokarczuk, belongs to this group of visionary, innovative writers. In its citation, the Swedish Academy lauded her “narrative imagination that, with encyclopedic passion, represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Known for the mythical elements of her prose and for pushing the boundaries of narrative, Tokarczuk has built a reputation as a literary titan in her native Poland. This is evident in her 2007 novel, Bieguni. Translated into English as Flights in 2017, the novel received critical acclaim. It also earned Tokarczuk the distinction of being the first Polish writer to win the Man Booker International Prize; Flights was the 2018 winner. While it was not her first work translated into English, the book elevated her to global recognition, setting the stage for her eventual Nobel win. Flights is also one of two books the Polish author refers to as “constellation novels.”

As with many Nobel Laureates in Literature, Tokarczuk’s Nobel recognition sparked renewed interest in her earlier works, both translated and untranslated. In 2021, her 2014 novel Księgi Jakubowe was made available to Anglophone readers for the first time. It was cited by the Swedish Academy—and by other literary critics—as her magnum opus. In September 2025, her novel House of Day, House of Night was republished. Originally published in 1998 as Dom dzienny, dom nocny, it was first translated into English in 2002 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, making it the first of Tokarczuk’s works to be translated into English. The book was well-received. In Poland, it won her the 1998 Władysław Reymont Award and the 1999 Nike Literary Award. In 2004, it was also shortlisted for the prestigious International Dublin Literary Award.

I am actually an angel or a demon sent into the turmoil of one life on a sort of mission, which is either carrying itself out without my help, or else I have totally forgotten about it. This forgetfulness is part of the war–it’s the other side’s weapon, and they’ve attacked me with it so that I’m wounded, invalided out of the game for a while. As a result, I don’t know how powerful or how weak I am–I don’t know anything about myself because I can’t remember anything, and that’s why I don’t try to look for either weakness or power in myself. It’s an extraordinary feeling – to imagine that somewhere deep inside, you are someone completely different from the person you always thought you were. But it didn’t make me feel anxious, just relieved, finally free of a kind of weariness that used to permeate my life.

Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

House of Day, House of Night transports readers to a small, fictional, remote village in southwestern Poland near the Czech border. The enigmatic village lies adjacent to the modern town of Nowa Ruda (formerly Neurode), founded in 1363 as part of the Kingdom of Bohemia, a predecessor to modern-day Czechia. The village was part of the German Reich until 1945, when post-war boundary changes incorporated it into Poland. Three years before the story begins, an anonymous woman and her partner, R., moved to the village. She serves as the novel’s primary narrator and spiritual guide. The opening sequence describes their new home, transporting readers into a surreal landscape that the narrator once dreamed of. The village is sparsely populated yet scattered with expansive gardens and fields. Beneath it, inconvenient streams of water run.

Rather than following a straightforward plot, the novel unfolds as a series of vignettes. Like Flights, it rejects conventional narrative structure and serves as the second “constellation novel” in Tokarczuk’s lush oeuvre. The narrator darts back and forth in time, offering only glimpses of her life. Instead, the village itself becomes the main character. As the narrator moves through the village, she collects and shares stories from her neighbors. She introduces an eclectic mix of tragicomic, damned characters—from eccentrics to melancholy misfits—both past and present. Marek Marek, for instance, had a difficult childhood marked by physical abuse. He spent his youth hiding from his father. As an adult, he confronted him but also became convinced that he was inhabited by a bird—strange, immaterial, unnameable, with restless wings, fettered legs, and terrified eyes. Perpetually depressed, he resorts to drinking, unable to endure his existence.

Ergo Sum, a classics schoolmaster, was named by his father in a rare moment of good humor. During the Soviet invasion, he was deported to Siberia. Years later, a line in Plato’s Republic—”He who has tasted human entrails must become a wolf”—convinced him he was a werewolf. He began tying himself to a chair at night. Franz Frost, once drafted into the Nazi Wehrmacht, believes a newly discovered planet is the source of his nightmares. To shield himself from these dreams, he crafts a wooden hat from a fallen ash tree. True to its “constellation” nature, the novel also includes stories like that of Kummernis of Schönau, a folk saint whose father crucified her after she miraculously grew a beard to avoid being married off; and Paschalis, a monk who longed to be a woman and documented Kummernis’s story.

Among these fragmented narratives, one character stands out: Marta, who gradually emerges as the backbone of the novel. An eccentric wigmaker from another time, she reflects that “hair gathers a person’s thoughts as it grows… so that if you want to forget something or start anew, you should cut off your hair and bury it in the ground.” Always cold—even in summer—she wears a cardigan year-round and lives in rhythm with nature, deeply attuned to seasonal changes. A sort of sage and mushroom connoisseur, she shares knowledge that grounds the novel. Mushrooms recur as powerful symbols throughout the story. Elusive and mysterious, Marta constantly contradicts herself, telling different versions of her past and even giving different birth years.

People are built like houses inside- they have stairwells, spacious halls, vestibules that are always too weakly lit to count the doors into the rooms, row upon row of apartments, damp chambers, slimy, tiled bathrooms with cast-iron baths, steps with handrails taut as veins, artery-like corridors, joint-like landings, passages, guest rooms, draughty chambers into which a sudden current of warm air flows, closets, twists and turns and cubby-holes, and larders full of forgotten supplies.

Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

Still, Marta is the crucible through which the narrator learns about the history of the village, the local lore, and neighborhood gossip. Marta’s wisdom provides a steady presence amid the novel’s surreal and mythical elements. eanwhile, the narrator’s voice weaves the disparate stories into a lush tapestry riddled with intermittent dreamlike visions, mushroom recipes—harmless ones and those that could lead to peril—apocryphal texts, and various musings on diverse phenomena, including dahlias, mushrooms, astronomical charts, comets, and even nails. Motifs, particularly of mushrooms, are recurring. Despite the fragmented structure, House of Day, House of Night remains a compelling read. Every story and character contributes meaningfully to the broader narrative arc.

Even the most mundane details of daily life are layered with complexity. The characters’ eccentricities, along with prophetic signs and omens, hint at life’s larger mysteries. Together, these fragments capture the monumental history of the village. The characters’ lives intertwine with one another and with the fate of the town itself. As the novel progresses, the town transforms into a character in its own right—its checkered history taking center stage. The town serves as an allegory for the precariousness of history, straddling various identities. Originally German, then Czech, later annexed by Nazi Germany, and finally Polish, it resists fixed definition. This fluidity also mirrors the novel’s structure and themes, blending the mundane and metaphysical.

The boundaries between reality and imagination blur. The town becomes a microcosm of history’s instability, with borders drawn and redrawn. Its shifting identity underscores the themes of historical representation and fluidity. This echoes the novel’s refusal to conform to literary convention. Ambitious and intricate, it defies genre classification—true to Tokarczuk’s concept of the “constellation novel,” in which all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us. The titular house also becomes both a physical home and a metaphorical space, harboring the narrator’s dreams and imagination.

But it was not only the town’s identity that was fluid. A further illustration of fluidity is captured in the stories of Paschalis and Kummernis of Schönau. Gender and identity are also fluid. With the story darting in and out of different periods, time itself is a construct. As the novel charts the stories of the prominent residents of the town, the novel also explores the intricacies of memory while examining the meaning of home and belongingness. All of these various themes and motifs also underscore the binaries that permeate the story. The book’s title itself is an allusion to this duality. A fragment carried the title Half of Life Takes Place in the Dark, and Marta notes that half of humanity is asleep while the other half is awake. There is a strike of balance, even when it straddles the boundaries of the mythical and the historical.

The orange sky kept shining all the time – neither warm nor cold, motionless and indifferent. The hill was still covered in forest, but when he looked at it closely he could see that it was dead; at some point it had hardened and turned to stone. Pinecones hung on the spruce trees, and their branches were still covered in ashen needles, because there was no wind to scatter them. He had a terrible foreboding that if an sort of movement were to occur in this landscape the forest would come crashing down and turn to dust.

Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

The most significant binary, however, is life and death. It is as vital as the contrast between waking and dreaming. The characters live eccentric yet meaningful lives, enriching the town’s texture. Their deaths are equally intense and unforgettable. One elderly German, born in the village, returns later in life and dies atop a mountain. His body was found lying across the border, prompting ethical and legal dilemmas for the authorities. Through such stories, Tokarczuk affirms that both living and dying are essential to understanding life’s mysteries. The narrator captures this insight poignantly: For some reason people have developed a liking for only one sort of transformation. They are fond of increase and development but not decrease and disintegration. They prefer ripening to decay.

House of Day, House of Night is an ambitious undertaking—so much so that it has long been considered Tokarczuk’s most difficult and challenging work. It resists literary convention and redefines what storytelling can be. Like its content, storytelling in the novel is fluid. Despite its fragmented structure, the narrative is held together by Tokarczuk’s masterful prose. Her vivid, sensory language evokes the landscape and seasons, creating an immersive reading experience. Natural events like floods and meadow fires mirror shifts in both the physical and literary terrain. Echoes of her later works abound: the narrator’s fascination with stars and moon-watching gatherings recalls Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, while the structure resembles Flights. Still, House of Day, House of Night stands entirely on its own.

Woven from fragments into a rich literary tapestry, House of Day, House of Night is a singular reading experience. Tokarczuk’s first novel translated into English, it unravels the story of a village caught in a historical quandary—its identity constantly shaped and reshaped by time and forces beyond its control. While rooted in historical representation, Tokarczuk’s narrative blends dreams, omens, essays, and mythology. At its core, the novel explores fluidity: of identity, time, memory, gender, and even storytelling. It straddles the binaries of day and night, life and death, myth and history. These elements are masterfully woven into a profound narrative that urges readers to reconsider the influences of stories in shaping our understanding of place, time, and self. House of Day, House of Night is a powerful, thought-provoking read that underscores the enduring brilliance of Tokarczuk’s prose.

This was how the end must look. No deluge, no rains of fire, no Auschwitz, no comet. This is how the world will look when God has deserted it, whoever he is. Like an abandoned house, everything coated in cosmic dust, muggy and steeped in silence. Everything living will congeal and grow mold in the light that has no pulse and therefore is dead. In this spectral light everything will crumble.

Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night
Book Specs

Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Translator (from Polish): Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Publisher:  Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2023 (1998)
Number of Pages: 319
Genre: Literary

Synopsis

A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants now, but it teems with the stories of the living and the dead. 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 accident. 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.

Another brilliant “constellation novel” in the ode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night reminds us that the story of any place, no matter how humble, is boundless.

About the Author

To learn more about the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature awardee and multi-awarded writer Olga Tokarczuk, click here.