House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead, 1998)
In a region that was once Germany but is now Poland, a woman and her husband make a life in a house where a stream runs through the foundation. Their neighbors include Marta, an older woman and wig maker, and So-and-so, who tells the story of how young Marek Marek hanged himself. Other stories weave through this place: a man dies on the Czech border and his body is dragged from one side to the other; a young monk writes the story of a saint and longs desperately to be a woman; a husband and wife each fall in love with a mysterious visitor, neither of them knowing of the other’s indiscretion. Occasionally, Germans are seen walking through the fields at night, digging in the ground. There’s a question here about place and displacement, about what happens when the people who built a town come to haunt it, and the people who live in it walk lightly over the ground.
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