One could say that achieving this balance requires the long term of the child’s perspective. In one of the most interesting sentences of the book, the father says to Wiola:
This world is weirdly arranged (…) I haven’t yet had the chance to really see it, and they already call me an old man, while inside I like these guguły.
The regionalism in the Polish title of the book – 'guguły' – means sour, unripe fruits, which makes immaturity one of the main themes of the book.
Evoking immaturity through unripe fruit instead of psychological description reveals one more feature of the author’s work. Grzegorzewska is undoubtedly most interesting, when she describes concrete things, giving them priority over general statements.
Swallowing Mercury was translated into English by Eliza Marciniak. The novel brought Greg a nomination for the Man Booker International Prize. As Kapka Kassabove enthusiastically reviewed the book for The Guardian:
Greg moves back and forth across time with a poet’s panache. It is refreshing to find a fiction writer so free of stylistic pomp, so finely attuned to the truth of her material, a novel so sensually saturated. The full cumulative power of Greg’s prose is felt towards the end, as it accelerates alongside Wiola’s adolescence – until we are swept into the unknown.
Published in 2017, Stancje (Boarding Houses, trans. AP) is a loose continuation of her previous novel. Filling her book with flowery prose, Grzegorzewska describes the further dilemmas Wiola runs into after moving from her village to the town of Częstochowa to study. The new circumstances give her space to reinterpret herself while living in the eponymous boarding houses – idiosyncratic places, like a workers’ hostel and a convent.
In 2017, Grzegorzewska also published a new book of poetry, Czasy Zespolone (Compound Times, trans. AP), in which the poet stitches together a patchwork of different chronologies: war, her childhood, and her present.