In the laboratory of Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize for Literature

A Hollywood star in conversation with a Nobel laureate. This is the strange exercise that actress Natalie Portman and Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk engaged in a few days ago. It is true that Tokarczuk, whose monumental “Books of Jakob”, which she took eight years to writehas just been published in the United States, has never been so much admired, its books awaited, its interventions commented on.

While she published her new novel in Poland last June (it is about Thomas Mann and “the Magic Mountain”), Editions Noir sur Blanc is publishing an older collection of short stories in France, which allows penetrate into the rich narrative laboratory of the novelist.

A young woman is immersed in reading a detective novel written on the model of “Ten Little Negroes”. She ends up joining the characters of the book that she kills one by one. An old lady hosts a writing residency for a Polish novelist for a month in Scotland. Their meeting and Mrs. Scotsman’s house turn out to be full of surprises for the young visitor. A writer is forced to cohabit with his fictional double, who soon takes his place, correcting his manuscripts to his great despair. At the end of the war, a refugee on his way to Palestine ends up on a desert island and learns to survive like a new Robinson.

In Olga Tokarczuk’s short stories, the boundaries between reality and fiction are shifting, just like