This narrative act of reordering is

This narrative act of reordering is an epistemological pursuit that attempts to decipher how and what we can know about a place “filled” with lacunae of lost memories and pasts. Tokarczuk seems to ask: If History does not attend to these gaps, what other ways can we learn about the past and this world? Tokarczuk’s epistemological pursuit subordinates the complex twentieth-century history of this region to individual histories that are connected by place and objects, such as cars, pewter plates, and well-made knives left behind by the von Goetzen family, the founder of Neurode, and other German expellees.