Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel

It's an strange title (turns out to be a quote from William Blake of Tiger Tiger fame) and initially that strangeness seems to permeate the book, but it turns out to be a fascinating well-plotted story from a corner of the world (eastern Poland) I don't know much about. Great translation. This is a book that rewards a little persistence.

A superb novel, told in the voice of an elderly, eccentric, animal-rights toting woman who satirises hunters, pernicious minor politicians and hypocritical churchmen, while considering everything through her own astrological analyses. Amusing, tense and telling.

Probably some politics involved in the choice of this author's work for a Nobel prize. A cross between a literary novel, a whodunit, and a feminist revenge fantasy. The story has it’s charm, but the ending is predictable–and not altogether believable. There are a few nuggets of wisdom along the way. For example, the narrator notes that a man who uses the phrase “in truth” over and over is probably a liar. Because we see the action through the eyes of the self-obsessed main character, there’s not much development of the secondary characters.If you’re looking for a good read, two novels that didn’t get nearly the kind of attention this one got but are actually funnier and more engaging are: I AM GOD by Giacomo Sartori and SAMUEL JOHNSON’S ETERNAL RETURN by Martin Riker. Oh, and THE HANGING ARTIST by Jon Steinhagen is lots of fun too.

Janina Duszejko is elderly, lives a rather isolated life in a small rural community, looks after her neighbours’ vacant properties during the winter, loves her dogs, occasionally teaches English in the local school.Using frequent capitalisations to create a homely phraseology, Olga Tokarczuk describes Duszejko’s way of life, her wry observations and musings on a wide variety of everyday issues, her deep convictions, for example on animal rights, her interest in astrology and William Blake, and her cynicism of human behaviour. It’s a charming engaging read.The interpretations and convictions of isolated individuals have validity, though they are dismissed as eccentric by conventional society. For those who have the courage to pursue them to their logical conclusion, conflict with that society is inevitable.

This is fabulously written - thoughtful, moral, wicked, insane and utterly reasonable. And the translation is truly beautiful. Highly recommended.

What a brooding, eccentric, fantastical eco-mystery.Tokarczuk's "Flights" won the Man Booker International Prize last year. "Drive Your Plow," published 10 years ago in Polish, has now made it to the English-reading audience and is long-listed for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker International."Drive Your Plow" is flooded with tension, yet Janina's tale of life and death and the environment and astrology in the passing of a year is almost languid. Janina lives year-round in a remote Polish summer resort conclave, tending her neighbors' cottages, teaching English in town one day a week and continuously in conflict with the vapid, the corrupt and, most especially, the hunters.She is older and has Ailments. Given names are unsuitable, so she renames people as she sees them. She has little use for television but relies on her laptop. On Friday nights, she makes vegetable soup for a former student and they translate Blake.And the murders begin, each a bit unearthly, more than a little symbolic and, Janina is convinced, committed in karmic ways by creatures of the forest. Look at the evidence! Deer. Foxes. Bugs. Could hosts of animals and insects exact revenge against the humans who disrespect them the most?But no one will listen.Until they do.

50 percent was as far as I got. Call me obtuse but I could not figure out where this book was going or why I cared. The main character really was nuts. Not just eccentric. Being inside her head was not interesting nor did it help me figure out why I cared what she thought. There were 2 dead people, but at halfway through there didn’t appear to be any relationship to the main character or her actions. Maybe I’m too impatient. Maybe something is lost in that I don’t know the culture.

Unusual and interesting book. Enjoyed the characters, and their names - unlike most book characters - no confusion over which one is this? The conclusion was a little surprising - maybe even unsettling. I recommend this thought provoking read.

In life one can expect to read a handful of books that are truly exceptional, that reveal the world in a new and fresh way that makes the reader a bigger person. This is one of my handful. At a superficial level it’s an ingenious murder mystery, narrated by an eccentric, slightly mad older woman, living remotely on the Polish-Czech border. But it’s punctuated by her on-going musings about human destiny, animal rights, the environment and the way in which most people choose to cauterise their imaginations and joyfulness in the pursuit of tiny lives only noticeable for their petty and destructive banality. The translation is brilliant. I had to keep stopping and rereading sentences, so dense in meaning and beauty that one read was not enough.

Through a murder mystery in a rural Polish village we have intelligent musings on William Blake, horoscopes, ageing, hunting, love of animals, cruelty, the disregard of those we consider outcasts and our own failings. Sound boring? I tore through it like a thriller! Viva Janina, Oddball, Good News and Dizzy!

Such beautiful writing is utterly compelling, unputdownable. The way civilisation treats animals and other humans is telling, and this quiet, powerful, novel illustrates our total disregard of what we know is right.

I prefer this to Flights. It is a lot more coherent in terms of narrative and themes; there is also a shard of black humour. It’s odd but like any good book creates a world and characters which engage. I liked some of the more unlikely aspects of the novel, such as the central character having a highly technical professional background, in sharp contrast to her dreamsy world view. It is a thriller of sorts but it is also concerned with human and l think largely male attitudes towards the natural world.

'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead' is the first book I've read by the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. The most obvious question to ask, then, is: did this feel like a book written by somebody who had so mastered the craft of writing that they would go on to win the big prize? The answer is, for me, a clear no. The book took me from the middle of June to the start of September to get through - I would pick it up, read a few pages, get bored, and put it back down to go off and do something else instead. I finished it more out of a sense of duty - the book was a birthday present from my wife - than anything else.So, what of the story? Well, Mrs Duszejko lives out in the wooded mountains in the west of Poland, close to the Czech border. She has a few friends, and she has nicknames for them all - and for the other people she knows in the nearby village. She loves animals, she doesn't eat meat (or at least I don't think she does - I can't now remember), she is fascinated by the poetry of William Blake, and she is a keen astrologer. Very keen, in fact. So keen that large swathes of the book are given over to musings on how much of an impact astrology has on the world. When she isn't talking about the stars, though, she is all too keen to tell us the back story to pretty much everything she encounters, and this really brings the book to a thudding halt on more than one occasion.Anyway, the story proceeds in fits and starts, as first her neighbour and then some other notable citizens are found dead and/or murdered. Mrs Duszejko thinks that the people have all been killed by animals - retribution for their own suffering at the hands of these hunters. But, without wanting to spoil the ending, Mrs Duszejko is a terribly unreliable narrator, and if you've recently watched any of the John Wick films the ending might not be as much as a surprise as Tokarczuk would have wanted.