Op 10 oktober 2019 werd bekendgemaakt dat de Nobelprijs voor Literatuur 2018 werd toegekend aan Olga Tokarczuk. De Poolse schrijfster Olga Tokarczuk werd geboren in Sulechów, dichtbij Zielona Góra, op 29 januari 1962. (Het jaar 2018 was het jaar dat de Nobelprijs wegens enkele schandalen niet is uitgereikt). De jury prijst Tokarczuks “narratieve verbeelding die met encyclopedische passie het oversteken van grenzen als levensvorm vertegenwoordigt”. Ook krijgt ze lof voor haar humor en spitsvondigheid die terug te vinden is in haar werk.
Uit: Flights (Vertaald door Jennifer Croft)
“THE WORLD IN YOUR HEAD
The first trip I ever took was across the fields, on foot. It took them a long time to notice I was gone, which meant I was able to make it quite some distance. I covered the whole park and even – going down dirt roads, through the corn and the damp meadows teeming with cowslip flowers, sectioned into squares by ditches – reached the river. Though of course the river was ubiquitous in that valley, soaking up under the ground cover and lapping at the fields.
Clambering up onto the embankment, I could see an undulating ribbon, a road that kept flowing outside of the frame, outside of the world. If you were lucky, you might catch sight of a boat there, one of those great flat boats gliding over the river in either direction, oblivious to the shores, to the trees, to the people who stand on the embankment, unreliable landmarks, perhaps, not worth remarking, just an audience to the boats’ own motion, so full of grace. I dreamed of working on a boat like that when I grew up – or even better, of becoming one of those boats.
It wasn’t a big river, only the Oder, but I, too, was little then. It had its place in the hierarchy of rivers, which I later checked on the maps – a minor one, but present, nonetheless, a kind of country viscountess at the court of the Amazon Queen. But it was more than enough for me. It seemed enormous. It flowed as it liked, essentially unimpeded, prone to flooding, unpredictable.
Occasionally along the banks it would catch on some underwater obstacle, and eddies would develop. But the river flowed on, parading, concerned only with its hidden aims beyond the horizon, somewhere far off to the north. Your eyes couldn’t keep focused on the water, which pulled your gaze along up past the horizon, so that you’d lose your balance.
To me, of course, the river paid no attention, caring only for itself, those changing, roving waters into which – as I later learned – you can never step twice.
Every year it charged a steep price to bear the weight of those boats – because each year someone drowned in the river, whether a child taking a dip on a hot summer’s day or some drunk who somehow wound up on the bridge and, in spite of the railing, still fell into the water. The search for the drowned always took place with great pomp and circumstance, with everyone in the vicinity waiting with bated breath. They’d bring in divers and army boats.
According to adults’ accounts we overheard, the recovered bodies were swollen and pale – the water had rinsed all the life out of them, blurring their facial features to such an extent that their loved ones would have a hard time identifying their corpses.”
