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Polish author Wioletta Gregg discusses her new novel from Transit Books, Swallowing Mercury.
Longlisted for The Man Booker International Prize, Swallowing Mercury looks back on youth in a close-knit, agricultural community in 1980s Poland through the eyes of Wiola. Her memories are precise, intense, distinctive, sensual: a playfulness and whimsy rise up in the gossip of the village women, rumored visits from the Pope, and the locked room in the dressmaker’s house, while political unrest and predatory men cast shadows across this bright portrait. In prose that sparkles with a poet’s touch, Wioletta Gregg’s debut animates the strange wonders of growing up.
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“A trivial mishap could set off a fire in Mia’s home, Mia’s mother could suddenly go missing, Mia could spontaneously decide to run away from home without taking any clothes, or Mia could suddenly die. None of these scenarios, in fact or in theory, is impossible. No one knows what might happen to Mia tomorrow. But the same goes for anyone. So why is it that we are continuing with Mia’s story? Perhaps by chance, perhaps by necessity. Just like how the boy in Mia’s class who had bought the chicks asked whether they were male or female and no one knew, no one knows if it was Father 1 or Father 2 who bought Mia’s sweater, and even if someone knew, these are the kind of questions for which no evidence can be produced. In truth, no one knows the truth.
After Mia falls into a deep sleep her mother comes home, but even when she comes home, Mia’s mother isn’t there. Mia’s name was made by combining a syllable in her father’s name, ah, with a syllable found in her mother’s, me. Around the time Mia was born, it was popular to name children by this formula, and her parents each explained to their parents that Mia’s name meant ‘beautiful child.’ They didn’t explain that it also meant ‘lost child.'”