To every place there belongs a story . . .
Spoor (Polish: Pokot) is a 2017 Polish crime film directed by Agnieszka Holland. It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear in the main competition section of the 67th Berlin International Film Festival. At Berlin, the film won the Alfred Bauer Prize (Silver Bear).
The film is set in a remote mountainous region of the Kłodzko Valley in south-western Poland, where an elderly woman, Janina Duszejko, turns witness to a violent and mysterious death of several hunters. She is convinced she knows who the murderer is, but nobody believes her story.
The Polish-language title, Pokot, is a hunting term that refers to the count of wild animals killed. The English title Spoor refers to the traces and tracks left behind by the hunted game. The film is adapted from a novel "Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych" ("Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead") by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk.
Berlin film festival 2017
Pokot (Spoor) review – Miss Marple meets Angela Carter in the trackless Polish forestAgnieszka Holland’s new film is a mix of forensic crime story and magical realist fairy tale that, adapted from Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, doesn’t always hang together
Peter Bradshaw
Sun 12 Feb 2017 15.30 GMT
Agnieszka Holland, renowned Polish director of works including Europa, Europa, is back with a new film taking us on an eco-fabulist murder mystery tour deep into the central European forest, starring a beautiful ageing woman with a long grey hair and a passing resemblance to Angela Carter.
She is the eccentric Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka) a part-time teacher and full-time mystic living alone in a village on the Polish-Czech border, loved by her young pupils but hated by the boorish menfolk thereabouts for her passionate hatred of their hunting and animal slaughter; she will disrupt shooting parties, screaming and crying, and often makes angry complaints to the lazy uncaring police when animals are killed out of season.
The police are always wearily impolite to her – although I sort of sympathised with them when Duszejko reveals herself to be an astrologer and says that belief in astrology is equivalent to belief in evolution. Worryingly, there is every sign that we are supposed to nod understandingly at that.
When Duszejko’s two beloved dogs vanish, she understandably suspects some kind of foul play, and that the smug hunting enthusiasts have taken a spiteful revenge on her. But then these men’s bodies start turning up all over the place, including that great trackless forest, horribly murdered in various occult ways. Duszejko gets on the killer’s trail (or spoor), and as far as she is concerned, the culprit may not be human. Should the police really be looking for an ... animal?
Duszejko winds up falling in love with a visiting entomologist and beetle lover of Polish origin who tells her, deadpan, that “mushroom picking in the forest is the only thing that brings Poles together”. His priestly seriousness in saying that is something that Aki Kaurismaki could admire. The film is watchable in its quirky and wayward way, with some funny moments – though shallower than it thinks.
How does this title in Polish, "Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych" ("Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead"), connect to William Blake's Proverbs of Hell? Is the cart missing for some reason?
She is by no means an overtly political writer, yet Tokarczuk’s work has come to be seen as an implicit challenge to the incumbent Law and Justice party’s (PiS) steady erosion of human rights. Though it is her novel Bieguni (Flights) that has been shortlisted for next week’s Man Booker international prize, it is Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead) that is back in the spotlight, thanks to Pokot (Spoor), a film adaptation by Agnieszka Holland.
The novel, whose title is taken from a line in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is narrated by Janina Duszejko, a 60-something former engineer, now an English teacher and caretaker of dilapidated summer homes along the Czech-Polish border. “I love crossing borders,” she declares, about life on the other side, where “the language isn’t suited to quarrelling” – unlike in her own country, “a land of neurotic egotists”.
Indeed, the novel is haunted by an acute awareness of how language is used to manipulate us. Though Duszejko is having none of it. An ostensibly humble vigilante, she has a way with words, writing to the authorities to deplore their lack of action and accountability, and awarding her friends monikers such as “Oddball” and “Good News”. To perceive and cultivate difference, to rename, she believes, are simple means of resistance.
Duszejko’s deep concern for the natural environment manifests itself in a fierce anti-hunting stance allied to an increasingly desperate lament for the decimation of her country’s very own “green and pleasant land”. Her conviction clearly speaks to Polish readers: at recent demonstrations against the logging of the Białowieża forest, one banner read, “Janina Duszejko won’t forgive you!”
The novel, whose title is taken from a line in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is narrated by Janina Duszejko, a 60-something former engineer, now an English teacher and caretaker of dilapidated summer homes along the Czech-Polish border. “I love crossing borders,” she declares, about life on the other side, where “the language isn’t suited to quarrelling” – unlike in her own country, “a land of neurotic egotists”.
Indeed, the novel is haunted by an acute awareness of how language is used to manipulate us. Though Duszejko is having none of it. An ostensibly humble vigilante, she has a way with words, writing to the authorities to deplore their lack of action and accountability, and awarding her friends monikers such as “Oddball” and “Good News”. To perceive and cultivate difference, to rename, she believes, are simple means of resistance.
Duszejko’s deep concern for the natural environment manifests itself in a fierce anti-hunting stance allied to an increasingly desperate lament for the decimation of her country’s very own “green and pleasant land”. Her conviction clearly speaks to Polish readers: at recent demonstrations against the logging of the Białowieża forest, one banner read, “Janina Duszejko won’t forgive you!”
James Hopkin
Claire Armitstead
Fri 20 Apr 2018 12.00 BST‘When I read English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things’ … Olga Tokarczuk.
When Olga Tokarczuk’s sixth novel, Flights, was about to be published in the UK last year the Bookseller trilled that “she is probably one of the greatest living writers you have never heard of”. The trade weekly, speaking specifically to a UK readership, can be forgiven for making such a bald assertion – even though she has had two previous novels translated into English – since it is only now that Flights has been shortlisted for the Man Booker international prize that Tokarczuk has begun to command the sort of attention in the English-speaking world that her home fans would consider her due. She has long been one of Poland’s highest profile writers – a vegetarian feminist in an increasingly reactionary, patriarchal country, and a public intellectual whose every utterance can make news headlines.
Flights combines (among other things) the observations of a fretful modern traveller with the story of a wandering Slavic sect, a biography of a 17th-century Flemish anatomist and an account of the posthumous journey of Chopin’s heart from Paris, where the Polish composer died, to his desired resting place in Warsaw.
I meet Tokarczuk before an interview at the British Library by the critic Adam Mars-Jones, who wrote a highly complimentary review of Flights in the London Review of Books. “It could almost be an inventory of the ways narrative can serve a writer short of, and beyond, telling a story,” he said. “The book’s prose is a lucid medium in which narrative crystals grow to an ideal size, independent structures not disturbing the balance of the whole.”
Tokarczuk prefers an astronomical metaphor, explaining that, just as the ancients looked at stars in the sky and found ways to group them and then to relate them to the shapes of creatures or figures, so what she calls her “constellation novels” throw stories, essays and sketches into orbit, allowing the reader’s imagination to form them into meaningful shapes.
Our previous meeting was a year earlier in a Warsaw cafe, when Flights had yet to be published in the UK. The vagaries of English translation meant we were there to discuss a novel that was originally published in 2007. She is currently best known in Poland for a 900-page historical epic called The Books of Jacob published in 2014 (and due out in English next year).
In Poland, Tokarczuk was branded a 'targowiczanin' – an ancient term for traitor
Set on the border between modern-day Ukraine and Poland, The Books of Jacob tells the story of Jakub Frank, a Jewish-born religious leader who led the forcible conversion of fellow Jews to Catholicism in the 18th century. The novel itself was well received, selling 170,000 copies in hardback and winning her a second Nike award, known as “the Polish Booker”. But in a television interview after the award Tokarczuk outraged rightwing patriots by saying that, contrary to its self-image as a plucky survivor of oppression, Poland itself had committed “horrendous acts” of colonisation at times in its history. She was branded a “targowiczanin” – an ancient term for traitor – and her publisher had to hire bodyguards for a while to protect her. “I was very naive. I thought we’d be able to discuss the dark areas in our history,” she said.
Days later she sailed into another controversy, when a film of her 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – titled Pokot (Spoor) – was premiered at the Berlin film festival. Scripted by Tokarczuk in collaboration with director Agnieszka Holland, it was denounced by a Polish news agency as “a deeply anti-Christian [work] that promoted eco-terrorism”. It went on to take Berlin’s prestigious Silver Bear, and, at a joint press conference, the duo were jubilant. “We are thinking of putting it on the promotional posters,” joked Holland, “because it will encourage people who might otherwise not have bothered to come and see it.”
Readers who have come to Tokarczuk’s work through Flights are likely to be disorientated by Drive Your Plow, which will be published in English this autumn. It is a strongly voiced existential thriller, in which an elderly eccentric living in a remote village finds her quiet life overturned as first a neighbour, then a police chief and a local bigwig are found battered to death.
She wrote the novel between Flights and The Books of Jacob and her explanation is disarming, involving a two-book deal and a handy fashion for detective stories. “But just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time, so I decided to put into it animal rights and a story of dissenting citizens who realise that the law is immoral and see how far can they can go with saying no to it.”
Hunting has become a hot political issue in Poland since the novel was published, but at the time few were thinking about it. “Some people said that once again Tokarczuk is an old crazy woman doing weird things, but then this big discussion started on the internet about what we can do about this very patriarchal, Catholic tradition.”
Characteristically of this magpie writer, the title is stolen from William Blake’s revolutionary manifesto The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Not only is each chapter prefaced with lines of Blake’s poetry, but the protagonist has befriended a young translator whose attempt to render the poet into Polish at one point creates five different versions of a single stanza, causing a severe headache for Tokarczuk’s own translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones (American Jennifer Croft is responsible for Flights). One might almost suspect Tokarczuk of making fun when she gave her character the line: “Right at the start, a dispute arose over whether we should translate the English word ‘mental’ as mentalny – ‘mental’ in the literal sense, ‘of the mind’ – or duchowy – more like ‘spiritual’.”
Like her protagonist, Tokarczuk and her partner Grzegorz Zegadło – a translator specialising in German – live in rural Lower Silesia, a southern region of Poland that only became part of the country after the second world war. “I’m lucky to have such an empty piece of land to describe because in Polish literature there are no legends or fairytales about it,” she says.
It is “a very special place” with a Tuscan micro-climate, which became a sacred space for members of the “68 generation” – hippies and artists, not to mention several translators of Blake, who had discovered the poet in the false dawn of the late 60s, along with the music of the Doors and the Animals.
She quit as a psychologist after 'working with one of my patients and realising I was much more disturbed than he was'
Tokarczuk was six years old, and living in the small town of Sulechów, when the student protests of 1968 erupted. Her father’s family were refugees from a part of Poland that is now in Ukraine. Both parents were teachers who “lived in an island of leftwing intellectuals, but not communists”, and whose book-lined house filled their daughter’s head with the possibility of becoming an author.
Instead, a “romantic notion of helping people” took her to Warsaw University, where she studied psychology and developed a fascination with the work of Carl Jung, which remains a cornerstone of her writing. After graduating she took a hospital job as a specialist in addiction, married a fellow psychologist and gave birth to a son. But after five years, she decided she was too fragile to continue at the hospital. “I was working with one of my patients and realised I was much more disturbed than he was.”
She left her job and published a collection of poetry, quickly followed by a novel, The Journey of the People of the Book – a parable set in 17th-century France – which won a prize for best debut. Though the books, and the prizes, kept rolling in, in her mid‑30s Tokarczuk hit a crisis and decided she needed to take some time out to travel, wandering from Taiwan to New Zealand on her own, and taking her young son off to Malaysia one particularly cold Polish winter. With her trademark dreadlocks she looks as though she left part of her heart on the hippie trail, though – as she has explained with a characteristically informal scholarliness – her hairstyle is actually a plica polonica, or “Polish tangle”, reports of which date back to the 17th century. “In a certain sense we can be proud to have introduced this hairstyle to Europe,” she said. “Plica polonica should be added to the list of our inventions, alongside crude oil, pierogi and vodka.”
Today, she combines writing with co-hosting a boutique literary festival near her home. Though widely published throughout Europe, her books are only slowly emerging in the anglophone world. House of Day, House of Night (1998/2003), introduced her “constellation” style in a patchwork of stories, lists and essays a set in her home village across a wide historical timescale, while Primeval and Other Times chronicled the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious settlement over 80 years from 1914, from the point of view of the four archangels appointed to guard it. Published in 1996, it was only translated in 2009.
The literature of central Europe is very different from that of the west, she explains. “The first thing is that we don’t trust reality as much as you do. Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate. In such a form you can develop a story in a very linear way, but we don’t have this patience. We feel that in every moment something must be wrong because our own story wasn’t linear. Another difference is that you are rooted in psychoanalysis while we’re still thinking in a mythical, religious way.”
There’s a pause, as she zooms out to a wider historical focus: “If your country is wiped off the map and your language is banned, if your literature has to serve a cause, it becomes, however brilliant, rather hard to travel.” Or, seen from the other side, as it is so brilliantly and sardonically in Flights: “Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.”
• Flights is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
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