Constellation Novels: Olga Tokarczuk on Writing in Fragments

Nora Ellis

Your novels are made of fragments. Why does that shape feel truer to you than a single continuous plot?

Olga Tokarczuk

Because that's how we actually experience the world — in shards, in interruptions, on trains, between messages. I call it a constellation novel. You give the reader points of light and their mind draws the lines, and the shape they draw is part of the book. A tidy plot pretends life arrives in order. It doesn't.

Nora Ellis

Was that difficult to sell to publishers?

Olga Tokarczuk

At first, yes. I was told readers want a hero and a chase. I think readers are far more curious than that; they simply aren't asked very often. And a fragment has an enormous advantage — you can put a seventeenth-century anatomist next to a woman losing her family in an airport and the collision does the work of forty pages of explanation.

Nora Ellis

You worked as a psychologist. What did that leave in the writing?

Olga Tokarczuk

A tolerance for other people's logic. Everybody's reasoning makes perfect sense from inside; the job is to stand inside it long enough to describe it without mockery. That's clinical training and it's also, I think, the entire moral technique of a novel.

Nora Ellis

What is writing for?

Olga Tokarczuk

To practise tenderness towards what isn't ourselves. I mean animals, objects, strangers, the dead. Literature is the only instrument we have that lets you be someone else for a few hours and come back changed. That's not decoration. That's a kind of civic equipment.

Nora Ellis

One piece of advice?

Olga Tokarczuk

Keep a notebook of things that have no use yet. Most of my books began as a page of unrelated notes that refused to be thrown away.