The Lost Soul by Olga Tokarczuk & Joanna Concejo, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, review by Lynda Waterhouse

 

The Lost Soul literally dropped into my hands in the book shop. Its thick brown cover felt weighty and the pages were stiff and slow to turn. It felt like I was opening a long lost picture album filled with secrets.

Joanna Concejo’s monochrome pen and ink images were a welcome contrast to the other brightly coloured picture book covers on the shelf. It was hard to put down.

I was intrigued. The text was by Olga Tokarczuk (translated beautifully from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) who won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018: the ‘right’ kind of celebrity to be invited to write her first children’s book.

The book defied all the rules that picture book writers and illustrators are taught about layout and text and theme. There is someone smoking in it. The main character is a grown man. There are pages without any text and one page that is entirely text. It begins with pages of sombre pen and ink illustrations of a park in winter. We view the Breughel-like figures in the snow from above. There is a tiny red dot of a ball in one picture.

The first line of text is an enigmatic unfinished sentence:

If someone could look down on us from above, they’d see that the world is full of people running about in a hurry, sweating and very tired, and their lost souls...

The story begins with in the classic fairy tale world of ‘once upon a time’ and finishes with a ‘happily ever after’ but nothing else is familiar or expected. The Lost Soul tells the story of a man who worked very hard and very quickly and who had left his soul far behind him long ago. He was eating, sleeping, even playing tennis,

but sometimes he felt as if the world around him were flat, as if he were moving across a smooth page in a maths exercise book, entirely covered in evenly spaced squares.

This page is printed on a squared paper like a smooth exercise book.

The man has been moving so fast that he has been separated from his soul. A wise old doctor tells the man to find a place of his own, sit there quietly, and wait for your soul to catch up with you. The man finds a cottage at the edge of the city and he waits and he waits. In silence.

The next thirteen pages are devoid of text but filled with beautiful surreal images of the man’s cottage and the world outside as the man patiently awaits the return of his soul. His soul is portrayed as a young child.

Slowly colour comes into his life again. At first just a tinge on the edge of a tablecloth, then the sunlight through a train window, and eventually full bright colour. The man buries all his watches and suitcases in the garden which turn into beautiful flowers and pumpkins.

There is a real sense of poetry and magic to be discovered in this book. The illustrations in particular, like all good art and poetry, exudes a sense of meaning that is just out of reach and invites you to look again and again. Sit still and wait quietly to find your heart and soul.   

The book is hard to categorise and might be considered too adult for some children but I believe that younger children will love revisiting the images, hearing the story read aloud, and weaving their own narratives. A book for soul searchers of all ages.

ISBN 978-1-64421-034-5

Seven Stories Press www.sevenstories.com