Too Much World

“What if one life complements another, or if these lives intertwine in many ways without people realizing it? What if many people’s fates become entwined in ways that are hard to imagine? And what does it all mean?”

The characters meet for the first time shortly after the war, in the spring of 1946, in an apartment building in Wrocław that has been damaged by a bomb. Who are these people whose paths crossed amid the rubble of the Breslau fortress? What compelled them to gather around this strange cosmic axis that unites heaven, earth, and the underworld? Will the memory of the homes, crops, tastes, and smells they left behind fade away forever, like their murdered families and friends? Or will the memories live on within them, helping them to settle into a land that is as foreign to them as their new neighbours are? And will the secrets they brought with them, their wounds, their often murky past, and their new names—along with the waters of the rivers where they once lived—allow them to rebuild their identities? Or will they have to create entirely new ones

Too Much World is a constellation novel and a panopticon-style novel. It contains everything that inspires the greatest admiration in Olga Tokarczuk’s work. Lower Silesia, especially Wrocław and Wałbrzych, become the setting for one of the greatest social experiments in European history. The author, however, goes further—beyond the Western Territories—in describing its essence. In this ambitious and colourful novel, we journey alongside the characters through Lviv, Drohobych, and Buenos Aires; along the Dniester and Oder rivers; across mountains and plains; crossing several decades and several centuries and the journey takes  us all the way to the present day.