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Primeval and Other Times Spiral-Bound | 2010-04-15

Olga Tokarczuk Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Translated by)

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Olga Tokarczuk is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Set in the mythical Polish village of Primeval, a microcosm of the world populated with eccentric, archetypal characters and guarded by four archangels, this novel from Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk chronicles the lives of the inhabitants over the course of the feral 20th century in prose that is forceful, direct, and the stylistic cousin of the magic realism in Gabriel García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Told in short bursts of "Time," the narrative takes the form of a stylized fable, an epic allegory about the inexorable grind of time and the clash between modernity (the masculine) and nature (the feminine) in which Poland's tortured political history from 1914 to the contemporary era and the episodic brutality visited on ordinary village life is played out. A novel of universal dimension that does not dwell on the parochial, Primeval and Other Times was hailed as a contemporary European classic and heralded Tokarczuk as one of the leading voices in Polish as well as world literature.
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 248 pages
ISBN-10: 8086264351
Item Weight: 0.8 lbs
Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.6 x 7.9 inches
The book struck deep chords in readers, who responded to it as if a luminous new way of presenting 20th-century Poland had been found.
--The Economist
Olga Tokarczuk was born in 1962 in Sulechów near Zielona Góra, Poland. A recipient of all of Poland's top literary awards, she is one of the most critically acclaimed authors of her generation. After finishing her psychology degree at the University of Warsaw, she initially practiced as a therapist and often cites C.G. Jung as an inspiration for her work, in which mythmaking has become a hallmark. Her work has received nearly every major literary award at home and abroad, and Tokarczuk's importance as a writer was recognized with her being awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.