Swallowing Mercury is a series of 23 vignettes about a girl called Wiola growing up in an agricultural community in southern Poland in the 1970s and ’80s. This short novella dwells on the innocence of a time where children walked long distances on their own, where entertaining yourself in the surrounding wilderness while your parents worked was the norm, and where hens, wasps and bees were a usual part of the domestic landscape.

Wiola lives with her parents and grandparents who stay busy keeping the house and barn running, engaging in hobbies like bee-keeping and taxidermy, and taking naps in hay and under apple trees. At first, the world they inhabit appears purely magical but Wioletta Greg expertly weaves in the everyday dangers and violations that no child anywhere can escape.

Written originally in Polish, the book was translated into English by Eliza Marciniak and it won the English PEN award.

The backdrop of Wiola’s story is the collapse of communism and the imminent fall of the Soviet Bloc in the ’90s. The vignettes acknowledge this course of history but stay focussed on Wiola’s extraordinary days in her village. One particularly memorable chapter is the one where the personal and the political collide as Wiola paints a picture of Moscow city for an art competition. Before she can submit the painting, ink spills on it and she is forced to submit it in that form. Her smudged painting draws the attention of the authorities who read rebellion and catastrophe in the defiled landscape of the drawing. The fear of political opposition runs high in communist Poland in the ’80s. The book is a necessary supplement to some of the more stark stories from communist Poland, where one gets to know the parts of the country that stay partially insulated from the tension.

Much of the book concerns itself with small-town life and its reliance on local wisdom and folklore. In this charming paragraph, Greg draws an intimate portrait of a woman trying to shield her house and herself.

“My mother was terrified of storms. As soon as it began to thunder, she’d cross herself, take down the laundry from the lines strung between our two apple trees, bolt shut all the doors and windows, pull plugs out of sockets, hide metal objects and cover the top of the washing machine with a blanket, so that it wouldn’t draw lightning. Finally, she would sit on the bed, cover herself with a feather duvet and call me over.

‘Be straight with me, have you killed a spider again? You know well enough that it brings thunderstorms.’”

The novella employs local beliefs, ghost stories, Christian folklore, food, and drinking customs. The visceral descriptions make one realise how important both the land and its bounty, and the interconnectedness of the villagers is to the sustenance of this community. The book follows Wiola through a childhood of scrapes and near-accidents, walking through the snow and collecting bugs, to a young adulthood that is noticed by others before it fully dawns on Wiola herself, who continues to collect interesting matchbox labels. The Polish title of the book is guguly which means ‘unripe fruit’. In a vulnerable moment, Wiola’s father tells her that though the world thinks of him as old, inside he is like an unripe fruit. The idea of growing up is challenged throughout the book as Wiola deals with experiences beyond her years and her father appears to be unable to move beyond a certain point in life.

Most of the vignettes are less than five pages long and this novella can be enjoyably read in half an afternoon. But what limits it from being a great book is that it is difficult to discern what lies beneath the surface of Wiola and the other characters. The book leaves one with the feeling that though you know a great deal of what has happened in Wiola’s adolescence, you do not know that much about who she is. The sole character who we are allowed to see beyond anecdotes is Wiola’s father who has returned from military detention and “had been living in two houses: one was a stone ruin wobbling unsteadily over its limestone foundations, while the other, which for years had been forming in his head, was a clean brick house with central heating (...)”

Swallowing Mercury is similar to The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, which is about a young girl’s summers on a Finnish island with her grandmother. If you liked The Summer Book , chances are you will enjoy Swallowing Mercury , although the former has more heart.

Urvashi Bahugunais a poet living in Delhi

comment COMMENT NOW