Women of the World discussion

Use this thread to discuss our June group read, Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg. Please do not post full reviews until June the 12th, to allow those who are going to read it the time to do so.

I don't think I can get a copy to to those that can, enjoy.

I have downloaded my copy and am looking forward to reading it.

That’s a shame, Carrie.

Looking forward to reading your thoughts on the book, Karen.

It's wonderful to see that you've given the book a 5 star rating, Karen! I await your review.

How do these discussions work?

I thought the book was wonderful and innovative in style and structure, and would love to hear what others have to say.

We invite all participants in any group book read to post their reviews on or after the 12th of each month. This is just to give everyone who wishes to participate enough time to source and read the book. You can post a full review, as I do, or just snippets of thoughts. It’s entirely up to you.

I'm going to be posting my spoiler-free review below. I look forward to talking about the book with you all!

I was incredibly intrigued by poet Wioletta Greg's first prose piece, Swallowing Mercury, particularly given that it was chosen for an online book club which I run.  The novella, translated from its original Polish by Eliza Marciniak, is the winner of the English PEN Award.  Sarah Perry writes that she 'experienced this book like a series of cool, clear drinks, each one more intoxicating than the last', and Carys Davies compares the 'freshness and truthfulness' here to the work of Elena Ferrante and Tove Jansson, a personal favourite of mine. 

The focus of Swallowing Mercury is upon a young girl named Wiola, who is growing up in a fictional village in southern Poland during the 1970s and 80s.  It is 'about the ordinary passing of years filled with extraordinary days.  In vivid prose filled wit texture, colour and sound, it describes the adult world encroaching on the child's.  From childhood to adolescence, Wiola dances to the strange music of her own imagination.'  Swallowing Mercury is a coming-of-age work, and looks particularly at the way in which its young protagonist interacts with the world and people around her.

The book is relatively fragmented, and is made up of many short, and sometimes barely connected chapters.  Its blurb gives only a few, largely unusual details about Wiola, ranging from the fact that her 'father was a deserter but now he's a taxidermist', and that her mother 'tells her that killing spiders brings on storms.'  Many of the chapters follow a similar suit, focusing on a single element of Wiola's life, like her fascination for collecting matchboxes.  The Poland which Wiola belongs to 'is both very recent and lost in time.'  The chapters in Swallowing Mercury are essentially vignettes, many of which have quite enchanting and intriguing titles - for instance, 'The Fairground Girl', 'Little Table, Set Thyself!', and 'The Belated Feeding of Bees'.

I found Greg's prose rather beguiling, echoing as it does fables and fairytales.  'The Fairground Girl', the first chapter in the collection, begins for instance: 'A christening shawl decorated with periwinkle and yellowed asparagus fern hung in the window of the store house for nearly two years.  It tempted with a little rose tucked in its folds, and I would have used it as a blanket for my dolls, but my mother wouldn't let me go near it.'  Also in this chapter, in which the fairytale element is arguably the strongest with regard to what follows, Greg writes: 'She brought me home in February.  Still bleeding from childbirth, she lay down on the bed, unwrapped my blanket, which reeked of mucus and urine, rubbed the stump of my umbilical cord with gentian violet, tied a red ribbon around my neck to ward off evil spirits and fell asleep for a few hours.  It was the sort of sleep during which a person decides whether to depart or to turn back.'

The quite lovely imagery which Greg creates is startling and fantastical; she talks, for instance, of her mother's 'head wreathed with a string of little bagels', a man having the 'impression that pine needles had grown out of his thighs and that brambles had sprung up inside his boots', and that 'woodworms were playing dodgeball using poppy seeds that had fallen from the crusts of freshly baked bread.'  

Swallowing Mercury has a real sense of imagination at its core.  I really enjoyed the unusual quality of the stories here, and enjoyed the interconnectedness which does begin to build once one gets a feel for Wiola's character.  A real sense of dark humour suffuses the collection, and the social history of Poland has been well woven in.  The author has paid such attention to a lot of Polish customs, both in a familial and religious sense.  Greg strikes a nice balance between realism and things which are slightly out of the ordinary.  Swallowing Mercury held my attention throughout; it has a real depth and flavour to it.  Some of the chapters are like Russian dolls, with stories nestling inside other stories.  I very much look forward to reading whichever of Greg's books are translated into English in future, and hope to pick up some of her poetry too.

Has anyone else started reading this yet?

I've finished the book. I'll share some thoughts on it soon.
A terrific review Kirsty!
I'd like to read Karen's review also. Karen?
Has anyone else read this book?

Hi Kirsty, Carrie, Karen and Terry !

I've also finished the book, I read it in one go, it was a very interesting read !

Thank you Kirsty for your fantastic review ! I've also been very sensitive to the structure of the book. Each chapter is a complete little story in itself but is also linked to the others, sometimes very subtly, like a fragile web (and spiders are so important in this book...).

Some topics really interested me : the social and political control in daily life, the rural life, the superstitions... and the way joy and sadness, cruelty and tenderness are mixed in all those slices of life.

For anyone who has read the book, I'm quite curious to know which chapter(s) you have particularly enjoyed... For my part, I have really liked « The woman with a dog ». I'm moved by stories about a collective traumatic past and the way to deal with it. « Unripe » was also very moving...

So, I look forward to reading your impressions, Terry, Karen or anyone else ! :)

Thanks Terry! I eagerly await your thoughts on the book.

I too find all of the themes you’ve mentioned fascinating, Fuule. I feel as though the book encompassed so much, but was never too saturated. I adore your comment about the ‘fragile webs’ - that’s really beautiful, and captures it perfectly, I feel.

Hi Fuule! I was impressed with how elegantly Greg combined, as you pointed out, joy and sadness, cruelty and tenderness, within the same story.

The stories 'Sour Cherries', and 'Masters of Scrap', to give two examples, stood out for me, but most if not all the stories had at least sections I enjoyed very much.

Review of Swallowing Mercury, by Wioletta Greg. Portobello Books 2017. 146 p.

Swallowing Mercury is a loose collection of tales narrated mostly by a young girl named Wiolka. They are set in a small town in rural Poland from the 1970’s to the early 1990’s, through Wiolka’s childhood and adolescence.

All but one of the stories are narrated by Wiolka, and she is the audience for the other, though some stories are themselves stories within stories, as Wiolka narrates something told to her by someone else. She is the primary agent in some tales, and merely the witness in others. These tales are very loosely connected, and in some cases not at all, except for the book’s overall structure. Swallowing Mercury is really a connected series of short tales and vigenettes. The chronological structure of the stories and the presence of Wiolka provides a slight sense of a larger story. Wiolka’s own story is part of that, but the town of Hektary itself could be considered the true main character.
Hektary is a town resisting the passage of time. Fold beliefs and superstition mingle together. Events of the outside world only lightly touch the town, especially as seen through the viewpoint of young Wiolka.
As a portrayal of life in a rural town, Swallowing Mercury belongs in an unofficial subgenre along with, for example, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, and Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are?.
Wioletta Greg is very good at taking a very minor or at least brief episode in Wiolka’s life and enlarging it into an engrossing story. Greg uses that practiced poets ability to narrow focus and create vivid detail, and she has learned to simultaneously enlarge the scope of her writing without losing that focus, to create colorful and evocative short stories. This is not as easy as it may sound. I have found that many poets write prose as though they believe prose to be filler between the occasional bright passage of prose-poetry.
Except for Wiolka herself, the characters remain plot devices, or mere shadows. Perhaps the effort to write from a child’s point of view and so limited understanding of the world and events around her own, restricted Greg’s ability to visualize character, or at least to depict it withing the narrative limits of the young narrator. But it is possible to provide sufficient dialogue and action to create deep characters even with that limitation.
Also, there is little or no narrative thrust in some of the stories. This is not necessarily a problem, but I would like to see Wioletta Greg handle more complex narrative structures.
Most impressive about Greg’s writing is the way she creates vivid scenes even from more or less standard narration and scene setting, raising those scenes to a higher level of art.
For example, after opening the book and selecting passages at random, we find:
“On the way back, I started playing with the torch, illuminating knots in wooden fences and shining it on meadows covered by grey blankets of snow, on which dogs had spread out pig bones left over from the carnival slaughter. I kept turning the light on and off as if I were talking to the leafless trees in Morse code.”
And:
“Two large excavators were taking turns spewing out rich, black soil onto the field of stubble and goose foot. After a while, a dark blue Volkswagen pulled up next to the building site. The car’s wheels dug themselves into the mud. An elegant, slim woman in a blue waterproof jacket and white jodhpurs got out, followed by a black and tan mutt.”

Wonderful review, Terry! Thanks so much for sharing. I particularly enjoyed your comments about Hektary. The town felt so vivid whilst I was reading, and I really liked the way that the setting was built upon throughout the vignettes. I wonder if the book would have had the same power, in some ways, had it been set in a large, and therefore more anonymous, city.

Thank you, Kirsty. But, why "hating"?
I've been thinking of your comment wondering if Swallowing Mercury would have the same power if set in a city. I've pondered that off an on all afternoon, picturing the vignettes set in a district of Paris or London. I think the feel and circumstance of a small town is such an integral part of these stories that they would lose some of their force, or power, if moved to a city.

So sorry - my phone must have corrected that! I meant to say thanks for sharing. I completely agree with your comment; on reflection, I think a larger setting would have taken some of the power and poignancy away.

Thanks Terry for your interesting review ! Like Kirsty, I appreciated your comments about Hektary, regarded as the main character of the book.

I agree with both of you, the stories told in this book would have been very different if they had been transposed in a big city. I think rural areas have a specific culture. In my little town surrounded by countryside in northern France, superstitions and old beliefs remain alive, much more than in big cities. The contact with nature is very present and the rhythm of the seasons is more palpable. Maybe this difference also exists in Poland…

“Sour Cherries” and “Master of scrap” are interesting chapters. In “Master of Scrap” I really enjoyed how Greg depicts the particular relation between the grandfather and the stoves he set up. You’re right, each story contains at least a little gem !

Your comments about being more aware of nature in a more rural place are lovely, Fuule. Could you recommend any books set in northern France? I've spent a lot of time there over the years, but have never really been able to find anything specifically set there.

I borrowed a library copy, and thus cannot remember any of the titles which I particularly enjoyed. I'll see if I can find another copy at some point so we can compare favourite chapters.

Very interesting question 😊 I think the most iconic novel set in Normandy is Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, a classic in French literature. Many short stories written by Guy de Maupassant take place in the same area, in very rural landscapes. His most famous and very fascinating story “The Horla” is situated near Rouen.

More contemporary, and with a deep sociological dimension, Annie Ernaux’s books are very interesting. I would recommend A Frozen Woman, with many childhood scenes set in Yvetot, not very far away from Rouen.
Set near Cherbourg, there’s The Breakers by Claudie Gallay, but I haven’t read it yet, it’s on my TBR list 😊

I would also love to have some suggestions of books from all of you, set in your area. I like travelling through books and it could be a nice way to get to know each other !

Thanks so much for the suggestions! I really enjoyed Madame Bovary, but haven’t read much by de Maupassant and Ernaux; I must rectify this! Claudie Gallay is an author whom I haven’t even heard of, and I will seek out her work if it’s in English translation!

I’ve just moved, and am now living very close to central London. I’m sure there are hundreds of books which I could recommend set here, but I’ll have a think and then get back to you.