HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

One of the minor subplots of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel “House of Day, House of Night” involves a drifter named Leo, who was injured in a mining accident as a young man and lives off state compensation. He is something of an astrologer, obsessed with the sequences of numbers that underlie the universe. When his wife dies, he becomes a “proper clairvoyant”:

Images that had been suppressed for years began to surface in his head and spread like frost on a damp windowpane — they linked arms unexpectedly and made rings and fancy sequences; quite at random they built bewitching patterns that made perfect sense.

Leo’s abilities shouldn’t be taken entirely at face value: He’s a little crazy. But this description of his mental processes could also apply to the novel itself. Tokarczuk, a Nobel laureate who first published this book in her native Poland in 1998, has described it as a “constellation novel” in the vein of her much-acclaimed 2007 book “Flights.”

Indeed, “House of Day, House of Night” is not so much a novel as it is an anthology of stories, poems, recipes and other short writings that are linked, like the frost on a windowpane, by “bewitching patterns”: themes, people, settings.

The two main characters are the unnamed narrator and her neighbor Marta, an old woman who tends to appear only in the summer. Marta lives alone and is hard to pin down in normal terms — she has no relatives to speak of, and even her history is a little vague. “She has told me many different versions of the facts about herself,” the narrator says.

Marta is identified mostly by vibe. She has a certain smell, “of damp forced to dry out quickly,” and makes wigs in her spare time, though she doesn’t seem to sell any. The two women spend time together over the hot summer days, going through their routines: cooling off, running errands, doing chores, people-watching, swapping recipes and stories and theories of life.

But this isn’t really a novel about their friendship. At the heart of the book are two longish narratives. The first, written in a booklet that the narrator finds in a souvenir shop, is “The Life of Kummernis of Schonau,” based on the legend of St. Wilgefortis. In it, a convent girl dreams of growing a beard to avoid being forced into marriage by her father; she wants to stay pure and virginal. The dream comes true, but the consequences are grim.

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