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A lot of contemporary fiction can be viewed as a confluence of plot and character. An important concept is the character arc—the depiction of the transformation or inner journey of a character over the course of a story. Our old friend Aristotle talked about this. A classic story structure concerns a protagonist who begins as one sort of person, and as a result of conflict and developments in the story, transforms into someone different by the end. There are many variations o

A strong thread in the episodic stream of threads in Primeval and Other Times concerns Squire Popielski and the Game. In mid-life, the Squire experiences a major emotional crisis after a painful love affair leaves him physically ill and bed ridden. Three questions occur to him as he struggles to recover: Where do I come from? What can a person actually know? How should a person live? His wife tells him there is a rabbi who is a healer and that she has asked the rabbi to come

The title—Primeval and Other Times—refers to a central concept in fiction, time, although the word can have more than one meaning. Each vignette in the book is entitled “The Time of (someone or something),” which seems to indicate time as a discrete period, not as a philosophical concept. These time periods follow a generally linear path in that they begin in the year 1914 and end around 1980—based on the ages of some of the characters, although, as we shall see, it is not a

This week, a new story, Olga Tokarchuk’s 1996 Primeval and Other Times, originally written in Polish and translated to English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2010. It is set in the fictitious Polish village of Prawiek—translated as Primeval. Primeval—of or resembling the earliest ages in the history of the world. The novel tells the story of the inhabitants of Primeval over eight decades, beginning in 1914. Ms. Tokarchuk has said that the story is based on tales her maternal grand