#RivetingReviews: Tom Taylor reviews PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Nobel Prize-winning Olga Tokarczuk’s Primeval and Other Times, newly reissued by Fitzcarraldo, takes place in eastern Poland in the fictional village of Primeval and chronicles the lives of its inhabitants from 1914 to the 1980s. Despite being bound by two rivers and guarded by four angels, the village is unable to escape the horrors that Poland met in the twentieth century. And yet the specificity of the novel’s historical dimension and, ultimately, the characters’ inability to transcend it, is superseded by the Tokarczuk’s multidimensional, genre-defying, and encyclopaedic vision.
The novel’s backbone is formed by three generations of the Niebiesk/Bolski family, but Tokarczuk embellishes the narrative with focalisations from metaphysical beings, animals, trees, plants, and inanimate objects. Intimate portrayals of domesticity and labour, embellished with a wonderfully detailed, even taxonomic, approach to the materiality of rural life, are counterbalanced with universal themes related in a metaphysical register. Misia – daughter of Michał and Genowefa; wife of Paweł; mother of four children – reveres with quasi-religious veneration the coffee grinder that her father carried home as war plunder from ‘far away in the East’. Her angel, meanwhile ‘could see the vast ladder of existences, the extraordinary structure and the Eight Worlds contained within it’ and ‘had difficulty focusing attention on Misia’s world, which, like the world of other people and animals, was dark and full of suffering, like a murky pond overgrown with duckweed’.
That is not to say that Tokarczuk’s cosmologies accord to hierarchies. Primeval, described as ‘the centre of the universe’, is embedded in Catholic moral structure, its borders drawn by archangels, its dangers mapped by doctrine. But a Kabbalistic cosmology arrives, quietly destabilising any sense of a fixed divine order, while animistic, angelic and object cosmologies entirely refuse any singular worldview. In the plural inheritances of prewar eastern Poland, Catholic tradition sits alongside Hasidic folk legend and fairy tale, without hierarchy and without synthesis.
So it is that the mundanity of the coffee grinder is as significant as the omnipresence of supernatural angels. ‘Like every other thing’, Tokarczuk writes, ‘the grinder absorbed all the world’s confusion’. Objects, Tokarczuk elsewhere tells us, are ‘beings steeped in another reality’: only their surface is visible, while the rest, hidden away, defines their true magnitude. Paying homage to Swedenborg and a range of mystics, Tokarczuk confirms that the domestic and the cosmic are the same enquiry, simply conducted at different scales.
Tokarczuk instils her novels with a limpid authorial vision few other writers share. As she explained in her Nobel Prize lecture, hers is a ‘capacious and transgressive’ approach to storytelling; one that shows how ‘all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us’, thus enabling the reader ‘to discover entire constellations in the small particles of event’. In that regard, her novels reflect both the hopes and anxieties of the Information Age’s societal shift away from totalising, hierarchical knowledge systems to open-ended networks. Yet if her constellation method imagines meaning held in the particular – a grinder, for instance – then the anxiety her novels now quietly anticipate is the one we are living: that the network, scaled to the level of planetary intelligence, dissolves the particular into pattern, and that what gets lost in that translation is precisely what Adelka tucks into her suitcase without knowing why.
Reviewed by Tom Taylor
PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES
Written by Olga Tokarczuk
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (2026)
September 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Tom Taylor is a literary scout and writer based in London.
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