During the summer when the nights are hot making sleep difficult, I often seek refuge in short stories. This week has been particularly blistering but the books available don’t match my mood. On internet I discovered Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish author who won the 2018 Nobel Prize for literature for “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
Her short story “Seams” was available gratis so I read it. It’s about B., a man whose wife died a few months before and is having difficulties shifting to his new reality.
While sitting on the toilet, he notices for the first time that his socks had “full-length seams, from the toes up through the insteps all the way to the cuffs.” The discovery irritates him as he’d never noticed the seams before. So he goes to his sock drawer to see if the other socks have seams, too. He pulls out sock after sock and they all have seams. That socks are not smooth but have seams leaves him overwhelmed and angry.
Later while bagging his groceries at the store (bread and a can of pasztet*) he can’t help but ask the manager about seams in socks. The manager, “a big, strong woman with very light-colored skin and well-defined eyebrows that were as thin as threads” tells him that all socks have seams otherwise how could they stay together. When, B. asks himself, had socks ceased to be seamless and smooth?
Once home he notices that his windows need cleaning, that his wife’s clothing is still hanging around everywhere, that he has stacks of TV guides that need to be thrown away. Maybe, thinks B., he needs “to kick off this year—years began in the spring, after all, not on some number on a calendar—with an act of cleansing, like a ritual bath.”
B. becomes aware that there are many things he has never noticed before like the ink from his pens was not blue but brown like the color of rotting leaves. And that postage stamps are no longer square but round. “Dentate, colorful, the size of a zloty coin.” He goes to check old mail and finds that all the ink is brown and all the stamps are round. He’s sure that he isn’t losing his mind. Was it simply that he hadn’t paid attention before?
With the excuse of giving away his deceased wife’s clothing, he goes to his neighbor, Stasia. She’s hesitant to accept the clothes but offers B. cake and tea anyway. But when B. starts talking about seams in socks, brown ink, and round stamps, she becomes quite uncomfortable.
Although Olga Torakczuk rejects being considered a magical realist, her novels use many characteristics of this genre. The setting is defined by the perceptions of the protagonist and rational reality is disrupted.
My friend Bonnie had an unpleasant and unloving relationship with her mom. So, when her mom died, Bonnie felt no particular grief. But one morning six months later, she woke up and looked around her room in disbelief. She realized that she was seeing the world in color for the first time since her mother’s death. Up until then she’d been seeing only in black and white without realizing it. Bonnie’s rational mind refused to mourn but her psyche was not as accommodating.
Inside us all are realities we keep hidden even to ourselves.
*Pasztet is Polish pâté
“Seams” online HERE
The Narrative Within 