House of day house of night - Olga Tokarczuk - książka wyd. 2002

Opis

The town of Nowa Ruda and its surrounding countryside is a place ofshifting identities. Polish now, it has been German, Czech andAustro-Hungarian among other nationalities in the past. Here, at the heartof Europe, where borders move and languages and their speakers come and go,ordinary lives are not as simple as they appear. When the narrator and herhusband settle in the area, she soon discovers that the locals all havetheir secrets. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic elderly neighbour,she gathers their stories, moving back and forth in time and between truthand myth, disentangling the events of their days from the dreams of theirnights. A farmer is tormented by a mournful bird inside him thatstruggles to be free, a bank clerk sets out to find the owner of the voicethat declares love to her in her dreams, the gentle classics scholargrapples with his monthly metamorphosis into a werewolf, and a monk comesto terms with his own sexual ambiguity. Sprinkled between these and otherstories are entries from a website that collects people's dreams, andrecipes for the many varieties of local mushrooms, from sweet puffballdessert to stuffed amanitas (for those who dare).