The Lost Soul – Olga Tokarczuk | #language & literature

After publishing ‘The Books of Jacob’ in Poland in 2013, the historical epic that has been considered her greatest work and that she has said left her mentally and physically depleted, Olga Tokarczuk wrote the text for a picture book. It is as if, after filling hundreds of pages with grand characters on her own, with voices from all the choirs of life and time, she needed to reach for something more collaborative, for something other than voices and words.

In 2017 Tokarczuk published The Lost Soul, and now, in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, it becomes Tokarczuk’s first book published in English since she won the 2018 Nobel Prize.

Other literary writers and Nobel winners, like Toni Morrison, have paused between novels to publish picture books. Each time another writer does this, she raises the question: why? Why practice a new genre? Why cede control of language, a singular vision, an entire book, to an illustrator? What can come from the alchemy of illustrations and simple words?

Tokarczuk has proved herself the master of perspective, and this book opens with the perspective of the sky and, from above, images of strangers marking the snow with their winding steps. The 48-page book shows John, a middle-aged man, who on one of his many travels for work wakes in a hotel room and forgets where he is – even who he is. ‘It was a strange feeling’, the narrator tells us.

Text

[…] he had no idea how he was going to find himself again. So he just kept very quiet. He didn’t say a word to himself all morning, and that made him feel extremely lonely, as if there were no one inside his body anymore.

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‘The Lost Soul’ by Joanna Concejo & Olga Tokarczuk, photo: Format Publishing House

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After the one-page narrative at the start, Tokarczuk and Joanna Concejo, the illustrator, show how they have achieved a palpable fusion of content and form. The pages empty of text and the absentminded bustle of life, of the harried search for value and meaning that afflicts the protagonist. John does not speak, and the book does not speak. The space of the page transforms, and in silence the reader turns to images of the surrounding landscape, unpeopled, stilled in sketch-think, gazed through half-light.

Tokarczuk, perhaps our best novelist working at philosophical and psychological questions, leaves the book on its own, leaves her character to wait for his soul. Concejo’s illustrations dramatise this quiet, important process, which perhaps could never be adequately represented in words. Which perhaps must not be represented in words. The drawings become silence, become change.

Concejo lays her images on pages made of grids, like in a scientific lab notebook. (This recalls John’s conundrum: the narrator tells us in the first paragraph that ‘sometimes he felt as if the world around him were flat, as if he were moving across a smooth page in a maths exercise book, entirely covered in evenly spaced squares’). The illustrations on the grids give the impression of an artist’s notebook, even a private notebook only meant for oneself, and they suggest how the book, and the protagonist, and the readers are all unfinished, constant works in progress, new sketches on the old, yellow-papered questions of life.

We gaze on stilled images – a face thought-halted in a busy restaurant, grasses leading up to the cottage, plants growing at the kitchen window – and dwell in their slowness, in the aura of mysterious faces, in the landscape and the dark.

These pages show moments when the world naturally slows, as, for example, one sits and waits for the next day – by a succession of nights and days, neither numbered by hours or calendar squares. We spot people: children bent over picking things from the sea, couples with languid faces dancing in a yard. It appears that a young girl, the man’s soul, travels slowly to him from far away while he sits with his back turned to us, his body marked by the passage of natural time: his hair slow-growing like plant stems through the window leaves falling from the trees, and trees and plants and deer sprouting, filling his little indoor room, untroubled by the exterior world.

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‘The Lost Soul’ by Joanna Concejo & Olga Tokarczuk, photo: Format Publishing House

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Finally the child peers through a window: on the opposite page she sees a man, his face obscured, holding a colourful plant. At his feet, a patient, expressionless cat. On opposite pages, the faces gaze upon each other, saying nothing. We view the coloured-in apartment, occupied by the smiles of contentment and green. Coloured-in: as if the grids on the previous pages, and life in frantic pace, were only a sketch of reality, were only a scribbled approximation of ourselves. All our words can wait. The pages turn. Memories return, postcards, index-sized pictures from youth. In the end, the narrator returns and says that afterwards ‘John was very careful not to do anything too fast’, and ‘he buried all his watches and suitcases in the garden’, which sprouts with flowers, pumpkins, life.

What are children’s books for? I don’t know, and I don’t know whether we can even call this a children’s book. Seven Stories Press advertises The Lost Soul as ‘the only book in English for readers of all ages by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk.’ It speaks, of course, to children and lightly warns them of the occupations, obsessions, and habits that deter one from a meaningful life and lead to personal confusion, the destruction of the natural world. It also speaks to older readers, leading them through a contemplation similar to the one John undertakes.

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‘The Lost Soul’ by Joanna Concejo & Olga Tokarczuk, photo: Format Publishing House

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There is something deeply moving in this slim volume of silent images and prose. Although Tokarczuk published it nearly three years ago, like so much of her other work it addresses our most contemporary problems and conditions before we can know them ourselves – like our frantic thoughtless romping of time and earth, which the pandemic suddenly made us see, the realisation, as Tokarczuk wrote last April, ‘that it isn’t that the virus is a disruption of the norm, but rather exactly the reverse – that the hectic world before the virus arrived was abnormal’.

We have been moving, moving, moving, and we have forgotten our souls. We have forgotten ourselves. In Concejo’s drawings and Tokarczuk’s mysteriously sparse prose, which absents itself from most of the book, we move closer to this space of silence, of growth, where we can begin to find what we have long ago forgotten and lost.

Olga Tokarczuk
Illustrated by Joanna Concejo
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
The Lost Soul (Zgubiona Dusza)
Seven Stories Press, New York 2021
ISBN: 9781644210345

Written by Marek Makowski, Feb 2020.

olga tokarczuk

children's books

book illustration

contemporary polish literature

polish literature in translation