Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

While I was intrigued by this novel from the very beginning, I ultimately felt that it took me rather too long to get into what was really going on in Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead. I should probably have reread the synopsis before starting the book so I didn't pick up on the earliest clues until they were revealed very late on. Instead I went into the story as if it were more slice-of-life fiction, exploring this remote Polish hamlet alongside Mrs Duszejko in her regular round as caretaker for the majority of the houses left unoccupied through the bitter winter. I loved Olga Tokarczuk's depictions of this rural environment with its deep forest and the perpetually impassable roads.

Mrs Duszejko (I shan't call her Janina!) is a wonderful character with whom I could strongly sympathise and empathise. Her idiosyncratic capitalising of certain proper nouns gave me insights into her priorities and beliefs. I learnt a lot about astrology too. What was most interesting to me though was Mrs Duszejko's awareness of how others viewed her, particularly authority figures for whom she would never be more than a batty old woman, and how she manipulated this perception. Her curiosity about the natural world around her appealed to me as, of course, did her stand against the flagrant disregard for Animals lives shown by the hunters. As Mrs Duszejko herself tells us, ‘Its Animals show the truth about a country,’ I said. ‘Its attitude towards Animals. If people behave brutally towards Animals, no form of democracy is ever going help them, in fact nothing will at all.’

I loved how accurately Mrs Duszejko nick-named her neighbours too. There's a great moment where she lets one of these private nick-names slip and the person she's talking to immediately recognises who she means!

As a murder mystery, I felt that Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead differed memorably from the genre standards which I often find too formulaic. This novel also has a lot to say about our misjudged social norms, most obviously in the area of animal rights but also with other sharp observations such as, 'Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us. Why should I yield to their power and let them tell me what to think?' I very much enjoyed reading Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead and would certainly try more of Olga Tokarczuk's work in the future.

Left any possible spoiler content to the past paragraph. so you can stop before then.

Tokarczuk novel starts off with a loud knock on the door, a visitor, and in a hurried shuffle the discovery of a neighbours body in his home: a local hermit, poacher, and dog abuser whom our protagonist has a distinct dislike of. From there a interesting murder mystery unfolds exploring the relationships between a small community bordering the Czech Republic in Poland and the human and animal relations.

Our protagonist from the begin presents as an unreliable narrator, an elderly vegetarian woman with poor social skills, a strange naming convention for people in her life, an almost fanatical devotion to Astrology, and a passion for William Blakes Poetry which the novel derives its title from. I found myself both sympathetic to her and at odds with her stories, as we see the world through her eyes, with her perceptions and biases disjointing our perception of what is happening in this little community.

Presented as a subtle backdrop to the narrative is that our protagonist has lived through Polish communism and the influence of the Soviet Union which through shreds of details such as workers hostiles and land management practices you witness snippets of a world and context which has known more than one form of authoritarian governance.

In contrast to the ruminants of soviet economic and social planning, the small towns Catholicism plays as an element that grates against our protagonist and her friends as they explore and inquire into the murders that the novel centers around. the push/pull of religious conservatism and rural madwoman left me siding with our protagonist but also left confused by how she has skewed my perception of all of the events of the book.

All in all, I found the book a short, good read (200 pgs.) which kept me engrossed from it's disjointed world building through this womans lens, murder, inquiry, and a central theme of the ethics of human relations with animals. Definitely pick it up if you're looking for something to reboot your desire to read a book and you aren't sure where to start again.

SPOILER*******

Truly this was a really engaging read, which by it's conclusion reminded me vividly but with the loosest ties of the John Wick films due to the nature of seeking out to revenge for the death of dogs companions. I would recommend it, short and smart.

"Oh yes, the human body is most definitely inhuman, especially a dead one."

Maybe I'm not smart enough for literary fiction in some cases, but this just felt boring and tedious. Janina is an elderly Polish woman who loves her astrology and animals, and quickly becomes irritated with people who don't share her extremely inflexible morals where killing (for sport, for food, for necessity) is concerned. When neighbors and villagers start turning up dead under mysterious (and sometimes violent) circumstances, Janina thinks she has it all figured out, but nobody listens to the crazy hermit who lives out in the woods.

The book's written in a stream of consciousness style through Janina's eyes, so there's entire sections of the book that really don't relate to anything. She's a bit of an oddball, sends polite registered letters to the local cops asking them to check with their force's astrologer about the murders, and does other kooky old-person-cum-dorky-detective things you'd expect. Unfortunately the author does a great job of hammering home who the culprit is almost from the beginning, and even I was able to point to the right person around 15-20% in, so it's not really much of a mystery.

It also felt kind of preachy in some places, particularly when Janina goes off (mentally) about animal slaughter and environmental problems and such. I can't tell how much of that is character-driven and how much of that is author-driven, but it came off like a finger waggy school lesson in some places. These are all real issues, but a mystery novel feels like the wrong venue for trying to get your message across.

I don't know, I didn't connect much with this book. For a Nobel Prize winner, I expected something a bit more compelling. Instead I got a lot of dead air passages where I found myself mentally checking out until Janina (mentally) found the thread of where she was going plot-wise again. There's the bones (heh) of a good, dark story here, but I felt like they were buried under way too much meaningless meanderings and social commentary.

I usually don't like translated works. I don't trust the translation and I'm always second guessing the word choices. I doubt I'd have read [a:Olga Tokarczuk|296560|Olga Tokarczuk|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1588949514p2/296560.jpg]'s [b:Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead|42983724|Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead|Olga Tokarczuk|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547225640l/42983724.SY75.jpg|8099373] if it wasn't one of my library's monthly selections.
It has changed my mind about translations. You feel you're getting the author's voice.
Reading it made me feel like I was entering another world, that of it's narrator, an eccentric, aging Polish woman who loves astrology and animals.
After I read it, I looked at the many blurbs on the inner pages of the trade paperback edition. The blurb from the Guardian was one of the more absurd things I've read in decades: "One of the funniest books of the year."
I'd actually described it to friends as a comedy as a joke. It's anything but funny. It's dark as hell, but very good.

I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism—it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components, the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means "the dropping of petals." The world has dropped its petals.