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Pages 1-51Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 1-23 Summary
The narrator describes herself, her life, and her philosophy of travel through a series of vignettes. She characterizes her parents as “not fully the settling kind” and describes her childhood as one in which her parents oriented each year around their vacations (4). The narrator, by contrast, considers herself more energized by movement than her parents were and does not look to settle down in a particular place: “[M]y roots have always been shallow” (7). Her first experience of travel was walking to the Oder, a river in Poland that ran close to her childhood home. The river’s own movement informs the narrator’s understanding of her impulse to travel, as she believes that movement is better than rest.
The narrator moves between temporary jobs without the intention of starting a career. She has worked in retail, as a waitress, as a maid, and in various other jobs, holding each long enough to earn the money to move somewhere new. Before beginning this life of travel, the narrator studied psychology in a scientific environment she found sterile and uneventful. She decided not to pursue a career in psychology because she found it difficult not to relate her own life to those of her patients and because she resented the practice of personality profiling. While working as a maid, the narrator began writing a novel. Writing has become a compulsive activity for her, as it allows her to further explore the people and locations she encounters traveling.
Through her studies, the narrator came to understand that every person has a series of unconscious mental defenses protecting them from the realities of the world. She self-diagnoses herself as having “Recurrent Detoxification Syndrome,” which she characterizes as the compulsive search for a set of specific images: “My set of symptoms revolves around my being drawn to all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken” (17). This prompts the narrator to attend anatomical exhibits and curiosity shops wherever she travels. She describes one showcase of bones, organs, and preserved specimens to demonstrate the compulsion she feels to travel and observe these curiosities.
From the Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps, Tokarczuk includes an undated map of important rivers in Eastern Europe (5). On the map is the Oder.
Pages 24-38 Summary
The narrator begins a fictional tale of a man, Kunicki, on vacation with his wife (Jagoda) and young child. The family is on the small island of Vis near Croatia: There are two towns (Vis and Komiža), one road, and a small population of local residents. Kunicki sits in his car on the side of the road waiting for Jagoda to return from the woods, where she and the child are relieving themselves. Kunicki waits for more than 15 minutes. He begins to worry about his family getting lost and wonders if he failed to notice any details about Jagoda that would explain why she is taking so long: “[H]e hadn’t known he was supposed to be watching” (25). Kunicki leaves his car and searches the nearby woods but finds no trace of his wife or son. He consults the map of the island they keep in the car, returns to the woods to search again, and then finally admits that both Jagoda and his son are inexplicably gone.
Kunicki returns to Vis and finds their host, Branko, at a café. Before involving the police, the two men return to the site of Jagoda’s disappearance and search again. They can’t find the woman or child and involve the police before nightfall. As Kunicki speaks Polish and the residents Croatian, they use English as a go-between language. The police reassure Kunicki that the island is too small for anyone to become truly lost on it. However, the police fail to find the pair before the entire island must evacuate due to an impending flood.
The search resumes after the flood, with the police expanding their search to the mainland. Kunicki is told repeatedly that the island is too small for Jagoda and his son to go missing for long, yet the search efforts are repeatedly unsuccessful. A police dog follows the scent of Jagoda and their son through a ravine to an abandoned, small hut on the shore. Jagoda and their son are not there. Kunicki considers the possibility that they have been kidnapped.
From the Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps, Tokarczuk includes a map of St. Petersburg from 1850 (37).
Pages 38-51 Summary
The police involve a search helicopter to look for Jagoda and the child. Kunicki calls his job and extends his vacation by three days. Branko and Kunicki take Branko’s fishing boat along the coast of Vis looking for signs. When they return to the dock, the police are waiting for Kunicki. He has become a suspect in the disappearance and is questioned by the police. After the interrogation, they drive Kunicki back to the hotel. He pretends to enter the hotel as the police drive away but then immediately gets in his own car and begins driving around the island. He stops at a restaurant and sits, observing the people there. He envies the easy intimacy and comradery between a group at a nearby table: “He’d like to leave the shadows and join in with them. He’s never experienced that intensity” (44). Kunicki returns to the hotel. He unloads the family’s bags from the car and unpacks in the hotel room. He photographs all of his wife’s belongings. Among them is a museum ticket from earlier in their vacation with the Greek word kairos written on the back.
The next morning, Kunicki leaves the hotel and slowly retraces his family’s path on the island. He pulls up to the ferry dock to watch the people boarding, hoping for a sign. He questions the man selling tickets, who claims that he has seen neither Jagoda nor their son on the dock. Kunicki goes to the police station. The police offer him beer as a consolation since they have been unable to find any trace of the missing pair. Kunicki stays to eavesdrop on the police’s work until Branko arrives to take him to lunch. After, Kunicki returns to the hotel room without answers or hope that his family will return.
Pages 1-51 Analysis
The narrator’s desire for constant movement stems from her childhood perception of the Oder near her family’s home. By contrasting this with her family’s “timid” yearly vacations, the narrator situates her travel lifestyle as being rooted in her earliest experiences. She believes that any movement is better than being at rest and at risk of stagnating, as her disdain for her family’s insufficient travels demonstrates. Her love for the Oder becomes a desire to be like the waters of a river herself, constantly moving to new places. Tokarczuk includes the map of important rivers to demonstrate the continued intimacy that the narrator feels for the river near her childhood home. The paradox that this memory implies—the desire for constant motion encapsulated in a single, particular place—resurfaces throughout the book (e.g., in the fixedness of preservation, which also facilitates travel).
As the narrator discusses her history with psychology training, she describes the mental defense mechanisms people develop to cope with the reality of the world. Movement is inextricably tied to these defense mechanisms, as their purpose is to allow an individual to continue along a path in life without being so distracted by disappointments, fear, and sadness that they stop and allow society to consume them. The narrator believes in identity as a series of contextual movements that these defense mechanisms enhance; her main issue with working as a psychologist was personality profiling, as this implies that identity is static and unable to change. The narrator’s writing style reflects her sense of identity’s mobility. She combines fictional writing with her real experiences while traveling, signaling to the reader the lack of distinct boundaries between herself and the characters she creates.
In the context of the narrator’s musings on psychology, Kunicki’s vignette aims to dispel the idea of static personality while situating Kunicki’s moving identity within the idea of travel. The reader encounters Kunicki’s character during a time of extreme stress. His behavior and thoughts are therefore outside of his “normal” character profile. This challenges personality profiling during times of stress or environmental uncertainty—as traveling necessarily involves—and indicates that a person may move through identity in a much more drastic way than psychology conventionally implies. As the novel progresses, the narrator incorporates travel psychologists into her fragments, reconciling their more mobile beliefs on human nature with the kind of character study that the narrator herself prefers.
The narrator repeats the phrase “[e]ach of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim” regularly throughout the novel (19). Though she insists on a life of movement and travel, the narrator professes to be interested in this lifestyle primarily so she can interact with the anatomical exhibits or historical figures she finds most interesting. Her desire for anonymity—not including her name, not allowing herself to form lasting relationships—becomes a kind of magic trick: Instead of describing herself or her circumstances, she describes the things and people she sees, allowing their reflection to characterize her.
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