This book has been compared, with some justification to Gabriel García Márquez‘s Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years Of Solitude). As with the Colombian novel, much of this book tells of the family and their relatives and the people of their village in a fairly realistic manner. However, it also includes elements which you might describe as fantasy or magic realism. And Izydor looked again, just as Ivan Mutka had told him to. He strained his entire imagination and opened his eyes wide, until they started to water. Then for a brief moment he saw everything completely differently. Open space, empty and endless, stretched away in all directions. Everything within this dead expanse, every living thing was helpless and alone. Things were happening by accident, and when the accident failed, automatic law appeared - the rhythmical machinery of nature, the cogs and pistons of history, conformity with the rules that was rotting from the inside and crumbling to dust. Cold and sorrow reigned everywhere. Every living creature was trying to huddle up to something, to cling to something, to things, to each other, but all that resulted was suffering and despair. This is Primeval: an enclosed snow globe, a world in itself, which it may or may not be possible to ever leave. Outside, wars rise and then break like waves, disgorging soldiers

I saw that the concept of God and religion are constantly changing, and we need this change. I witnessed that we need to listen to more fairy tales, play more games, and live with a little more awareness, albeit occasionally. And at the end of all of this, however, I saw our attempt to give meaning to this thing called life. How magical and strange to be human. Tokarczuk's generational peers who share a similar poetic vision: it eschews Andrzej Stasiuk's zeal in Tales of Galicia for replacing older myths with the modern myth of consumerism, nor does it have any of

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For a relatively short novel, Primeval has enough philosophical heart to keep one endlessly chewing and digesting. The novel is directly linked to ideas of place, and the forest, as well as kitchens, bedrooms, and rooftops, all become elegant stages upon which the human comedy plays out. It was the ideal novel to read while navigating the emotional squalls of a children’s ward in a hospital, one that made me look long and hard at life and mortality but in a way that was humbly empowering and hopeful. Quiet and contemplative in tone, yet never dull or slow, Tokarczuk has created a masterpiece on human history that functions on multiple levels. It reminds us of our fleeting existence without making the realization one of terror or sadness but of joy to take part in a long lineage of roles in history. ‘ The powerful play goes on,’ as Whitman wrote, ‘ and you may contribute a verse.’ Let your verse be beautiful. more refined. Perhaps we would do well to recall that wonderful Polish tradition of "mythmaking," as found in the works of Bruno Schulz and Boleslaw Lesmian, where the mythical perception of the world If I was on last year’s BTBA fiction panel, I would have lobbied hard for Olga Tokarczuk’s Primeval and Other Times, a fascinating book about a small Polish village, its inhabitants, and all that happens to them over the course of the twentieth century. It’s a wonderful book that’s built out of small, discrete chunks that weave together into a very interesting way. The quality of what Izydor saw was temporality. Under a colourful outer coating everything was merging in collapse, decay, and destruction. and original, while also being uncommonly consistent with her other work as well. Unlike Schulz's chaotic, fantastical mythmaking, Primeval is calming and meditative, and it differs from the writing of

Tokarczuk spares us none of the unpleasant details: the German occupation and the round-up of the Jews, the final Nazi-Soviet battle, where Primeval becomes the battlefield and the corruption of the Communist era. There’s nothing to see when it’s like this anyway,” Tokarczuk added, sighing. “It’s all fogged over. Such a shame.” My conscious choice is to decide whether a coffee grinder is just a coffee grinder or whether it has symbolic meaning. The game that absorbs Squire Popielski, a labyrinth that will draw him in until nothing else matters. Is this the key to the whole novel? A sort of instruction manual for the journey that the reader also takes? It's tempting to see it that way:Home » Poland » Olga Tokarczuk » Prawiek i inne czasy (Primeval and Other Times) Olga Tokarczuk: Prawiek i inne czasy (Primeval and Other Times) As life takes birth from the ruins of destruction, life in Primeval blooms again, gradually expanding its wings to realize its full potential. World becomes different once more, times get changed. As we do in life, Tokarczuk’s characters try to solve the problem of their existence by analyzing the signs and symbols available to them. But how you help someone who has seen death, he who is seized with horror that soon he, too would change into a lifeless scrap of flesh, and that would be all that would be left of him. The realization brings tears to human eye who perhaps get blinded due to his qualities of greed and lust and unable to see that there is no birth or death- just an immortal process repeating itself time and again. And he who learns to forget would find relief. A strange image, nearly absurd in its symbolism, though in this glorious book such a claim strikes us as reasonable, even enlightening. Grinders grind, and that is why they exist. But no one knows what the grinder means in general. Perhaps the grinder is a splinter off some total, fundamental law of transformation, a law without which this world could not go round or would be completely different. Perhaps coffee grinders are the axis of reality, around which everything turns and unwinds, perhaps they are more important for the world than people. And perhaps Misia’s one single grinder is the pillar of what is called Primeval.” I turned on the TV Sunday afternoon, and the more the night drew on, the more I heard words like nation, victim, mystical coincidence, sign, accursed place, true patriotism, Katyn, truth. Politicians who only a few days ago were at each other’s throats are now speaking, in trembling voices, of “deep meaning” and “the metaphysics of Katyn.” Not much more than 20 years ago, some of these same people suppressed the truth about the deaths at Katyn to follow the Communist Party line. Monika (4 May 2020). "Niebiescy, Boscy, Prawiek i inne czasy. Wierszalin zaprasza online na spektakl sprzed 22 lat". Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish) . Retrieved 9 October 2020.