This Nobel Prize-winning novel tells the life of a small town and the fate of three generations!

Taikoo is a place, which is located in the center of the universe.

It is guarded by four angels. It owns towns and forests.

It is as simple as where you and I live, and as complicated as your life.

Taikooli is the representative work of Nobel Prize in Literature winner Olga Tokachuk, The World of Taikooli and Other Times.

In the author's book, Taikoo is a mythical primitive village, but in fact, it is the epitome of the whole world.

It tells a fable about the eternal conflict between modern and nature, and between men and women.

The story began at 19 14 and continues to this day. The novel shows the life picture of the whole human society in sections by subtitles.

Genovefa was the first person to appear. She and her husband run a small mill and could have lived a carefree life, but because of the war, her husband left home to fight, and his life and death were uncertain.

Olga said: War is the first disaster, and other disasters will follow.

The tragedy of Genaux's life was caused by war. In the days when her husband disappeared, she fell in love with the young man Eli from the initial waiting to despair. Just when they were so in love, Genovefa's husband Michal went home.

Jinuofa chose to return to michal.

In the novel, a conversation between her and Ellie is distressing.

She said to Ellie, go, as long as I see you, I can't sleep.

Ellie said, but I can't miss you.

Genovefa said: Everything forced us to break up. You are young, I am an old woman, you are Jewish, I am Polish, you are a free man, and I am a wife. You have been moving, but I will always stay in one place.

Back in michal, Genaux completely cut off contact with Ellie and started the life of an ordinary wife.

Love lurks in her heart, and she soaks in daily necessities.

However, when World War II started, she saw her ex-lover, Eli the Jew, killed by a German officer. She fell to the ground in pain and couldn't stand up anymore.

From then on, she can only shrink day by day, and there is no difference between life and death.

Ellie once told her that true love never dies, but what if her lover dies?

In novels, there are two completely different lifestyles, traditional and unconventional.

The women represented by Genovefa and her daughter Mi Xia show the living conditions of traditional women.

People in love women, represented by Maisui and her daughter Ruta, have demonstrated unconventional female routes, explorations and outlets.

In the end, all people and all roads lead to the same goal.

Because, as the author said: God is watching, time is passing, death is chasing, and eternity is waiting.

Michelle was spoiled by her father, michal, since she was a child. Her father took care of her and her mother gave up her love for her family.

When she grew up, Michelle fell in love with the poor mason, Pavel, the son of old Boschi.

Pavewu is an ambitious young man. He looked down on his incompetent father and hated his clumsy and ugly sisters. He believes in the truth of life, just like most of us ordinary people.

Pavewu said: people should live, raise children, earn money, get education, go higher and climb higher.

He enthusiastically pursued Michelle, because Michelle was born in a well-off family who was not a landlord but was very rich. This is a family that he works hard and can reach.

He compared Michelle to a small and exquisite Swiss watch, which is a symbol of a man's identity and status.

Then, the development of the story is no different from many stories.

Pavel made a fortune through hard work and opportunism. Then he cheated in middle age and broke up with Michelle. Michelle, like all middle-aged women, has become thick and rough because of one child after another.

But the relationship between two people, because of family ties, is deeply connected.

There is a plot in the novel. When her daughter was ill, Michelle was anxious and helpless, and Pavel bought medicine from the black market to treat her daughter. That night, Michelle hugged her tightly when she slept.

For young girls, love is a great thing, while for middle-aged women, the meaning of men's existence is not only love, but also the sharing of family burdens and responsibilities.

He can be an unqualified husband, as long as he can be a qualified father.

Michelle's compromise is not the compromise of most women. Is she pathetic?

No, her childhood father gave absolute love and she enjoyed life all her life. In our opinion, her husband's behavior made her life very sad, but maybe since she had children, her husband is no longer the focus of her life.

She has worked hard for her family and children all her life, fulfilling and practical. After her death, everyone was not used to it. The first person who fell down and never stood up was Pavel.

Michelle lives on him, so he doesn't live on Michelle.

Many families, on the surface, make money outside, and dignified men are the pillars of the family, but in fact, only in the end, women are the pillars of a family.

When the daughter came back, she only took Michelle's small coffee machine, which was given to her by her father. No matter how busy Michelle's life is, she will set aside time to drink coffee for herself.

It was the happy time she left for herself after she dedicated herself to her family. That's the only thing her daughter took away, and it's also a continuation of her future life.

In the novel, Michelle's father, michal, is a touching figure. He saw through his son-in-law's intentions early in the morning, but he couldn't stop his daughter's wishes. Therefore, in order to postpone the wedding and make her live comfortably after marriage, he spent three years building the largest and most comfortable house for her.

In sharp contrast with him, Pavu's father, Boschi, is an old bricklayer. Because he didn't realize his ambition and was dissatisfied with life, he vented all his anger on his daughter.

When he learned that Micha had built a big house for his daughter, he insisted on building a house for his daughter beside him out of vanity.

One bright, one backlight; A warm, a back Yang; One is high and the other is low.

When a handsome and rich man of unknown origin pursues his daughter, he wants to agree at once. Later, the man abandoned his wife and children and played around without asking his family.

For old Boschi, the daughter was just a tool to save her dignity, which contributed to the tragedy of her later life to some extent.

Therefore, parents, don't worry about the future life of their children, but worry that when she was very young, your love was not enough, not enough, not pure enough to support her to spend the rest of her life happily.

The wheat ear in the novel represents that kind of unconventional woman.

She is a slut in people's minds and lives in the forest. She gave birth to her daughter Ruta because of intercourse with a plant called Angelica dahurica.

When he was young, Mai Sui was rebellious and maverick, but when he was old, Mai Sui was open-minded, aware of all the difficulties in life and sincerely sympathized with everyone who was helpless.

Florence Tenka is a tragic old woman.

Her husband was drunk and fell into the river and drowned. Seven of her nine children died. She miscarried again and again, and almost died because of abortion. Her surviving son and daughter left her and disappeared somewhere in the world.

The old woman went crazy unconsciously. She suffers from insomnia and headaches at night. The bright moon interfered with her sleep. She thinks that the moon cursed herself, cursed her life and led to misfortune.

There is a description of her in the novel, which also represents the living conditions of many women in the past: the stronger a woman is, the more children she has; The more children there are, the weaker women are. In the 45th year of her life, Florence Tenka's body was liberated from the cycle of constant fertility, and she reached the state of infertility.

However, since then, a new life disaster has been waiting for her, and she is deeply mired in the pain of the past. She quarrels with the moon every day and curses its viciousness.

If you can't vent your anger and dissatisfaction on the moon, who can she vent it on, God? That's blasphemy.

Everyone thinks she is crazy, only Mai Sui understands her.

She told the old man a story, telling him that the moon had a dream for her and asked her to apologize for herself, because she was blind, insane and made many mistakes, which caused the old man to suffer all his life. And said that in order to compensate her, the moon made Maisui her daughter, and Maisui's daughter Rutaceae was her granddaughter.

Hearing this, the old man was relieved.

Her life is full of ups and downs and pains. She just wants fate to give her an explanation and an apology.

People trapped in the past are prone to depression and madness; People who are addicted to the future are prone to anxiety and confusion; Only by living in the present can we enjoy a quiet life.

Forgive fate, let go of the past, Florence with no future, and live the most comfortable and quiet life at this moment in the future.

The third generation is represented by Maisui's daughter Rutaceae and Micha's younger brother Genaux's son Izydor.

Genovefa was born with ears of wheat.

Genovefa gave birth to a son with brain edema, named Izydor. He is many years younger than Michelle, and the doctor said that he probably won't live long and it will be difficult for him to develop normally. Therefore, even after Michelle got married, she always lived with her younger brother and raised him as her own child.

Ruta and her mother Maisui live in the forest.

Coincidentally, Izydor and Ruta met and fell in love. Izydor taught Ruta to study, and Ruta taught Izydor to know nature.

However, after World War II, when the army entered Taikoo, Ruta was defiled, and a stubborn and enthusiastic girl could never marry Izdo again. Her way of expressing love is to tell him all her secrets.

Later, she married a rich businessman just to wear beautiful clothes. She also wanted to love this man, but this man didn't want her love, just wanted to control her.

Men really despise her.

The bold Ruta left Taikoo and fled to Cuba, becoming the first person to leave Taikoo and the one that Izydor will always remember.

In the novel, Izydor, regarded as a developmental disorder, is the only one who thinks about the way out and the meaning of life.

And the most thorough thinking, is the landlord wave Piski.

He experienced two world wars, wealth and post-war Soviet reconstruction, and all his property was confiscated.

Facing the ups and downs of life, his initial feeling was: I was born too late, the end of the world has come, and everything is over.

Finally, he questioned: Where does the evil in the world come from? Since God is good, why does he allow evil to exist? Isn't God kind?

The writer Olga Tokarcuk has a psychological background, but the theme of her novels seems to involve more philosophical exploration and theological research.

The core characters in the novel always stumble forward in the exploration of the true meaning of life, and religion is one of them, an important dimension.

Theologians claim that God created the world in six days. He separates light from darkness, sky from water. Then he created land, vegetation, planets and animals, and people. On the seventh day, he rested.

The scientist is puzzled because he only believes in the world in microscopes and telescopes.

Ordinary people are even more confused. After experiencing the deception of life, they asked Bo Piski, the landlord, does God really exist?

God exists, so does evil, pain, war and despair. So, what is the meaning of God's existence?

In the real world, Poland is a very religious country, but Poland has not survived the two world wars and survived between Germany and the Soviet Union after the war, so the image of God in the novel suffered heavy losses.

But this book is not a crusade against religion, it is more interesting and realistic, because the author gives another guess about the relationship between God and mankind.

In the Bible, God drove people out of the Garden of Eden, and God abandoned them. However, is there another possibility that it is not that God has driven mankind from a perfect world to a desolate, barren and painful world, but that human beings have left God on their own initiative and are willing to pursue a world without life scenes?

How else to explain the large-scale world war?

Although the world is not as good as heaven, it is also a place suitable for IKEA. It's just that human beings led the war that caused endless suffering and terrible tragedy.

It is man who has abandoned God.

More than 200 pages of books, more than 70 years, we followed the ancients and witnessed their experiences: houses collapsed after construction, families separated after reunion, lost after gaining, post-war peace and post-war war.

Ghosts wander, corpses rot, and God watches everything. In the long river of time, generation after generation, they will continue to cycle.

Some people say that this novel is very similar to One Hundred Years of Solitude. However, at the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, when the last person of the ancient family also disappeared from the world, the author said that such a family would never appear in the world again.

However, in Olga Tokachuk's novels, as anywhere else, people participate in it, including pain, illness, death, passion for love and darkness, and the ups and downs of life.

They are not heroes and have no special functions, but they will survive, no matter how hard it is, because they are eternal and persistent, and they are us.

In reality, Poles experienced two world wars and were occupied once. The people of China have experienced two world wars.

Whose history of blood and tears will be more than whose, whose suffering will be deeper than who.

But the blood of the nation continues from generation to generation.

What continues together is the continuous cycle of life.

Some people are obsessed with money, some enjoy nature, some obey God's will, some seek the meaning of life, some indulge in debauchery, and some indulge in books and games.

However, only one thing is certain: everyone and everything will come to an end, even if the world has no end and time has no end.

You may be able to escape somewhere, but you are trapped in this cycle. You can choose how to spend the rest of your life, but you can't decide how much time you can have.

Understand this, you will understand that this novel is a book about time, and the whole history of mankind is just a history of time.

Everything is fading away, nothing is eternal, God is old, only time is eternal.

There is a saying in the Bible: There is a time for sowing and harvesting, and there is a time for birth and death.

In other words, all human tragedies lie in not making good use of time and not treating it correctly.

So in the novel, with the passage of time, household appliances and cars instead of walking began to appear, but these things did not bring real happiness to mankind.

The aging cycle and ugly life still hang over everyone.

One generation is dying, and another generation is taking over a life full of disappointment.

Time is running out, and death is chasing.

In the cycle of time, at the intersection of the present and the future, human beings have not found a way to spend their lives well, or they are too stupid or too smart.

In a word, they wasted their time and life.

If theologians care about our beliefs; Moralists care about our conscience; Scientists care about our correct cognition; Psychologists care about our self-awareness.

Then the writer is the safety valve in all fields. He wants to make sure that when there are arguments in these fields, people will not fall into madness and extremes.

To some extent, writers should stand higher, see farther and have a more comprehensive understanding.

This is also Olga Calker's "holistic view" and the writer's "global view".

Olga Tokarcuk mentioned her mother when she delivered her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. She taught her how to look at the whole universe and how to use her rich imagination to expand the limits of human cognition.

Sadly, however, the real world and the modern world are constantly wasting human imagination and imprisoning human vision.

When the Internet appeared, people thought that it provided more convenient access to information and knowledge for all people and would bring wisdom to mankind, but on the contrary, we saw increasingly divided tribalism.

To give a simple example, when we visit various e-commerce platforms, the platform will only recommend similar things based on our browsing history; When we watch the news, the website will only recommend what we are interested in because of our reading preference.

Finally, the world we think is the world provided by the Internet. We just want to see it, and they only let us see it.

We are alienated from each other, trapped in the tribe, and secretly enjoying ourselves.

We are clamoring for truth and self, but is part of the truth the whole truth, the incorrect self you don't know, and the self you really want to stick to?

We are wandering in the lost and lonely, bound by an incomprehensible fate, and played by the main forces of reincarnation. Our spirituality is disappearing, becoming narrow and superficial, and becoming followers of various simple forces, money, status and fame.

Under such circumstances, in such a world, what is the difference between a living person and a zombie?

Tokarcuk believes that this crisis, which originated from reading, should also be solved from reading.

She suggested that all narrators tell stories in the fourth person way, that is, jump out and use a perspective that can see all the characters.

Only when the author has a holistic view can the reader have a holistic sense.

This reminds me of previous posts, and readers often say after reading a long article, what point does the author want to express?

You see, our readers are used to new media writers conveying an idea, but in fact, any writer conveys not only an idea, but more importantly, it awakens thinking.

Maybe there is no God in this world, but everyone can try to cultivate God's perspective.

The more comprehensive you look and the more real you live, the more qualified you are to say and stick to yourself. The easier it is to make the right choice in the cycle of time.

Text | Paris Night Rose

Figure | Google