Customer Reviews

House of Day, House of Night (Writings from an Unbound Europe)

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I picked up this book at the wonderful Massolit book store in Krakow Poland this summer. It is a very relaxing read, I got lost in the stories and loved the idea of collecting peoples dreams. This is a wonderful book full of short stories wrapped up in a novel.

Its an unusual novel (a novel novel?) set in a small town in Silesia (south west Poland) structured around a narrator's diary with lots of stories about the present and the past told by the mysterious old lady who lives/hibernates next door. Highly recommended for people interested in modern classics of Polish and central European story-telling.

I have noticed, over the years, that many Post-War Polish writers tend to write in short chapters, even short stories, that appear (often) unrelated yet acquire a relationship as the book progresses because of the interrelationships and accidental coincidences that occur. This appears to be largely true with "House of Day, House of Night". It becomes quite obvious, very quickly, that the book consists of a series of short stories (sometimes VERY short) that remind one of random(ish) notes one might make when researching a topic; recipes, descriptions of places and flora, conversations one has had. Dysfunctional characters appear; an alcoholic who watches his world disintegrate, a bank clerk who falls in love with the man in her dreams only to find reality harsh and disappointing, a survivor of the Gulags who finds himself condemned in a chance statement he reads in Plato.
My early impression of the book was of a portrait being painted with dabs of colour and shade here and there. In fact it began to remind me very much of a Swiss cheese full of holes except that it is the holes that are solid and the cheese that is empty space. The solid holes, at times, exude a sort of energy, an electricity that charges the empty space between them and begins to create something shadowy but still unreal.
There were times I found the book too disjointed. It is well-written and quite interesting at times but it didn't always grip my attention wholeheartedly. I would go off and do other things (draw, write, walk) so that my reading experience became even more disjointed. When I used to work I used to read a chapter of a book before I set off... this book would have been ideal for those days. Now, in my retirement, I don't enjoy "clever" books, I yearn for a gripping read, an interesting story.
And yet I do not feel I am doing the book justice. It IS well-written, some of the stories ARE interesting, poignant, even tragic. Every now and then some fascinating thread is developed or some character pulls at you... I feel there was a really good book here but it was left among the notes and jottings and never got written.

''House of Day, House of Night '' is a greatest novel. Everyone should read this novel if he loves polish literature, loves culture, loves reading and loves life.