Book review: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
You don't have to know anything about the author Olga Tokarczuk to enjoy this novel, but it helps. Olga won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2018 as well as the Man Book International for her novel “Flights”. She’s an outspoken feminist, vegetarian and animal rights advocate. As you can imagine, she’s hated by the right in her native Poland and has even received death threats. This novel feels a little bit like two fingers raised up at them.
It’s a humorous, quirky crime drama, set in a small village on the border of Poland and the Czech Republic. An aging woman, Janina Duszejko, who lives alone in an isolated corner of the village and is viewed as crazy by many, narrates the tale. Whereas most homes are empty during the harsh winter, Duszejko stays behind all year round, taking care of the empty homes as well as teaching English in a local school (she’s a retired engineer), using her spare hours to study astrology (her big passion), translate Blake’s poems with an old pupil and disarm traps in the forest (used by most local men as a hunting ground).
Some of the community’s hunters begin to drop dead and Duszejko develops a theory that nature has decided to exact revenge after so much unnecessary animal cruelty. Nobody believes her, of course, but Duszejko is somehow always close to the action, and always willing to write a long letter to the police with her theories (which just add to her reputation as crazy). Duszejko has by her side a small group of friends - other misfits in the area that don’t fit it - who seem to adore her, despite her eccentricities.
The white men who get killed - gun owners who enjoy killing for sport, who marry trophy wives, who claim to be religious, who boss and bully those around them, who have a lot of money - remind me so much of the ones hoarding the news today in the U.S., U.K., Brazil… - men who wield power for destructive effects. In our world of trivial cruelty, Duszejko is one of the sole voices from the periphery that can cross the borders of the real (daily village life) and the unreal (astrology; vengeful nature) to show us how life can be more poetical and unsettling than we realise.
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