Book Review of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

UPDATED: 2/5/2023

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318 pages, published in 2009 in Polish and published in English in 2018

YOU MAY ENJOY THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE:

Polish Fiction * Animal Rights * Literary Fiction

TRAVEL INSPIRATION:

This novel is set in a rural part of Poland near the border with the Czech Republic. The isolated, natural environment plays a significant role in the atmosphere set by the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: olga tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk is lauded in her native Poland as well as around the world as her novels have been translated into nearly 40 languages. She was a winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature and also won the Man Booker International Prize of the same year. She is primarily a writer of novels, though has also published a few books of short stories and her first published work was a book of poetry in 1989.

REVIEW OF Drive your plow over the bones of the dead BY olga tokarczuk

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is part crime novel, part animal rights activism, part a tale about aging, and part a tale about living as an outsider in your own community. Sprinkle in a dose of mysticism and astrology, and this is a book that is more than the sum of its parts.

Main character Janina, who abhors her first name, lives in a rural area outside of a small town in Poland near the border with the Czech Republic. She spends her days enjoying the natural life of animals around her, translating William Blake poetry with a friend (and it is from his poetry that the title of the novel springs forth), and serving as a caretaker for all the seasonal vacation homes in the area. It is a place where most people prefer to summer and only a hardy few could stomach year round.

Janina creates her own names for her neighbors, names that are more representative of their personalities than their given names. When she is awoken in the middle of the night by her closest neighbor, who informs her that he has discovered their third (and only other) neighbor, Big Foot, dead, the mystery central to the book takes off.

As the weeks and months pass, more members of the community die or disappear, and Janina notices a trend of animals around the scene of the crimes. Are they the murderers? Why would deer and other creatures of the forest want to murder people, you might ask? Janina’s theory is that it is revenge for the avid hunting in the area, a sport which most of her fellow townspeople undertake with a religious fervor. This is a theory that Janina explains patiently - at first - to the police and then with increasingly frustrated letters to them as they fail to take action against these potential perpetrators.

Throughout the novel, a colorful cast of characters pass through - from a scientist who is studying the local bug life to a woman who owns a local shop - and bring the world of Janina to life. Janina sees the world as others have forgotten to - through fresh eyes that question why humans are the way they are and how certain acts of violence, like recreational hunting, can be so normalized. As you might expect, the author has received some criticism for the views she espouses in this and other books.

I really enjoyed the novel even though for me, the resolution of the whodunit was obvious very early on (and this is rare for me). In a country (and world) that is increasingly polarized and where there are divisions among neighbors, Tokarczuk’s magnifies this through the experience of this one small town and explores how the lack of trust can erode a community. At the end of the day, it is only trusted relationships that will save us, as Janina finds out. This novel was a fresh look at the world and a unique twist on its genre. I have never read any books by this author before but definitely wish to read more of her novels now.