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

By Olga Tokarczuk and Antonia Lloyd-Jones

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

"A brilliant literary murder mystery." —Chicago Tribune

"Extraordinary. Tokarczuk's novel is funny, vivid, dangerous, and disturbing, and it raises some fierce questions about human behavior. My sincere admiration for her brilliant work." —Annie Proulx

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .

A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780525541356

Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels, three short story collections and has been translated into more than fifty languages. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, in Jennifer Croft’s translation. She is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. House of Day, House of Night is her fifth novel to appear in English with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

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Cover for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Praise for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

A marvelously weird and fablelike mystery . . . Authors with Tokarczuk’s vending machine of phrasing . . . and gimlet eye for human behavior . . . are rarely also masters of pacing and suspense. But even as Tokarczuk sticks landing after landing . . . her asides are never desultory or a liability. They are more like little cuts—quick, exacting and purposefully belated in their bleeding. . . . This book is not a mere whodunit: It’s a philosophical fairy tale about life and death that’s been trying to spill its secrets. Secrets that, if you’ve kept your ear to the ground, you knew in your bones all along.

—The New York Times Book Review

A paean to nature . . . a sort of ode to Blake . . . [and] a lament . . . Does Tokarczuk transcend Blake? Arguable—perhaps.

—NPR

"Drive Your Plow is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it’s one of the most existentially refreshing novels I’ve read in a long time."

—The New Yorker

One of the funniest books of the year.

—The Guardian

While it adopts the straightforward structure of a murder mystery, [the book features] macabre humor and morbid philosophical interludes [that] are distinctive to its author . . . [and an] excellent payoff at the finale. . . . As for Ms. Tokarczuk, there’s no doubt: She’s a gifted, original writer, and the appearance of her novels in English is a welcome development.

—The Wall Street Journal

"[A] winding, imaginative, genre-defying story. Part murder mystery, part fairy tale, Drive Your Plow is a thrilling philosophical examination of the ways in which some living creatures are privileged above others."

—Time

A brilliant literary murder mystery.

—Chicago Tribune

Reading this novel, I sometimes had the unsettling sensation that I was being told a fairy story from the perspective of the witch. . . . Her insistence that animal suffering matters is itself a kind of spell. The opposite idea is so firmly woven into our culture that reversing it would be a kind of magic.

—The New Republic

"Sometimes the opening sentence of a first-person narrative can so vividly capture the personality of its speaker that you immediately want to spend all the time you can in their company. That’s the case with . . . Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead . . . [a] barbed and subversive tale about what it takes to challenge the complacency of the powers that be."

—The Boston Globe

Bewitching . . . Serious crosscurrents . . . explore everything from animal rights to predetermination to the way society stigmatizes and marginalizes those it considers mad, strange or simply different . . . Tokarczuk is capable of miracles and ensures that this extraordinary novel soars.

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

Written with humor, charm, and a great talent for mystery . . . A sharp, memorable alternative to those dime-a-dozen beach bag potboilers without losing any of the whodunit appeal.

—Town & Country

Part investigative thriller and part fairy tale, with biting social critique and a wicked sense of humor.

—BookRiot

Also by Olga Tokarczuk

Flights

Book title, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Subtitle, A Novel, author, Olga Tokarczuk, imprint, Riverhead Books

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright © 2009 by Olga Tokarczuk

Translation copyright © 2018 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

First published as Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków

English-language edition first published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, London

First American edition published by Riverhead Books, 2019

A portion of this book was published, in different form, in Granta (138, Journeys) in 2017.

Riverhead and the R colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows:

Names: Tokarczuk, Olga, 1962- author. | Lloyd-Jones, Antonia, translator.

Title: Drive your plow over the bones of the dead : a novel / Olga Tokarczuk ; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Other titles: Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych. English

Description: First American edition. | New York, New York : Riverhead Books, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018038235 (print) | LCCN 2018043363 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525541356 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525541332 (hardcover)

Classification: LCC PG7179.O37 (ebook) | LCC PG7179.O37 P7613 2019 (print) | DDC 891.8/537—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038235

First Riverhead hardcover edition: August 2019

First Riverhead trade paperback edition: August 2020

Riverhead trade paperback ISBN: 9780525541349

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design: Alex Merto

btb_ppg_148317715_c0_r2

CONTENTS

I. Now Pay Attention

II. Testosterone Autism

III. Perpetual Light

IV. 999 Deaths

V. A Light in the Rain

VI. Trivia and Banalities

VII. A Speech to a Poodle

VIII. Uranus in Leo

IX. The Largest in the Smallest

X. Cucujus Haematodes

XI. The Singing of Bats

XII. The Vengeful Beast

XIII. The Night Archer

XIV. The Fall

XV. Saint Hubert

XVI. The Photograph

XVII. The Damsel

I.

Now Pay Attention

Once meek, and in a perilous path,

The just man kept his course along

The vale of death.

I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.

Had I examined the Ephemerides that evening to see what was happening in the sky, I wouldn’t have gone to bed at all. Meanwhile I had fallen very fast asleep; I had helped myself with an infusion of hops, and I also took two valerian pills. So when I was woken in the middle of the Night by hammering on the door—violent, immoderate and thus ill-omened—I was unable to come round. I sprang up and stood by the bed, unsteadily, because my sleepy, shaky body couldn’t make the leap from the innocence of sleep into wakefulness. I felt weak and began to reel, as if about to lose consciousness. Unfortunately this has been happening to me lately, and has to do with my Ailments. I had to sit down and tell myself several times: I’m at home, it’s Night, someone’s banging on the door; only then did I manage to control my nerves. As I searched for my slippers in the dark, I could hear that whoever had been banging was now walking around the house, muttering. Downstairs, in the cubbyhole for the electrical meters, I keep the pepper spray Dizzy gave me because of the poachers, and that was what now came to mind. In the darkness I managed to seek out the familiar, cold aerosol shape, and thus armed, I switched on the outside light, then looked at the porch through a small side window. There was a crunch of snow, and into my field of vision came my neighbor, whom I call Oddball. He was wrapping himself in the tails of the old sheepskin coat I’d sometimes seen him wearing as he worked outside the house. Below the coat I could see his striped pajamas and heavy hiking boots.

Open up, he said.

With undisguised astonishment he cast a glance at my linen suit (I sleep in something the Professor and his wife wanted to throw away last summer, which reminds me of a fashion from the past and the days of my youth—thus I combine the Practical and the Sentimental) and without a by-your-leave he came inside.

Please get dressed. Big Foot is dead.

For a while I was speechless with shock; without a word I put on my tall snow boots and the first fleece to hand from the coat rack. Outside, in the pool of light falling from the porch lamp, the snow was changing into a slow, sleepy shower. Oddball stood next to me in silence, tall, thin and bony like a figure sketched in a few pencil strokes. Every time he moved, snow fell from him like icing sugar from pastry ribbons.

What do you mean, dead? I finally asked, my throat tightening, as I opened the door, but Oddball didn’t answer.

He generally doesn’t say much. He must have Mercury in a reticent sign, I reckon it’s in Capricorn or on the cusp, in square or maybe in opposition to Saturn. It could also be Mercury in retrograde—that produces reserve.

We left the house and were instantly engulfed by the familiar cold, wet air that reminds us every winter that the world was not created for Mankind, and for at least half the year it shows us how very hostile it is to us. The frost brutally assailed our cheeks, and clouds of white steam came streaming from our mouths. The porch light went out automatically and we walked across the crunching snow in total darkness, except for Oddball’s headlamp, which pierced the pitch dark in one shifting spot, just in front of him, as I tripped along in the Murk behind him.

Don’t you have a flashlight? he asked.

Of course I had one, but I wouldn’t be able to tell where it was until morning. It’s a feature of flashlights that they’re only visible in the daytime.

Big Foot’s cottage stood slightly out of the way, higher up than the other houses. It was one of three inhabited all year round. Only he, Oddball and I lived here without fear of the winter; all the other inhabitants had sealed their houses shut in October, drained the water from the pipes and gone back to the city.

Now we turned off the partly cleared road that runs across our hamlet and splits into paths leading to each of the houses. A path trodden in deep snow led to Big Foot’s house, so narrow that you had to set one foot behind the other while trying to keep your balance.

It won’t be a pretty sight, warned Oddball, turning to face me, and briefly blinding me with his headlamp.

I wasn’t expecting anything else. For a while he was silent, and then, as if to explain himself, he said: I was alarmed by the light in his kitchen and the dog barking so plaintively. Didn’t you hear it?

No, I didn’t. I was asleep, numbed by hops and valerian.

Where is she now, the Dog?

I took her away from here—she’s at my place, I fed her and she seemed to calm down.

Another moment of silence.

He always put out the light and went to bed early to save money, but this time it continued to burn. A bright streak against the snow. Visible from my bedroom window. So I went over there, thinking he might have got drunk or was doing the dog harm, for it to be howling like that.

We passed a tumbledown barn and moments later Oddball’s flashlight fetched out of the darkness two pairs of shining eyes, pale green and fluorescent.

Look, Deer, I said in a raised whisper, grabbing him by the coat sleeve. They’ve come so close to the house. Aren’t they afraid?

The Deer were standing in the snow almost up to their bellies. They gazed at us calmly, as if we had caught them in the middle of performing a ritual whose meaning we couldn’t fathom. It was dark, so I couldn’t tell if they were the same Young Ladies who had come here from the Czech Republic in the autumn, or some new ones. And in fact why only two? That time there had been at least four of them.

Go home, I said to the Deer, and started waving my arms. They twitched, but didn’t move. They calmly stared after us, all the way to the front door. A shiver ran through me.

Meanwhile Oddball was stamping his feet to shake the snow off his boots outside the neglected cottage. The small windows were sealed with plastic and cardboard, and the wooden door was covered with black tar paper.

---

—

The walls in the hall were stacked with firewood for the stove, logs of uneven size. The interior was nasty, dirty and neglected. Throughout there was a smell of damp, of wood and earth—moist and voracious. The stink of smoke, years old, had settled on the walls in a greasy layer.

The door into the kitchen was ajar, and at once I saw Big Foot’s body lying on the floor. Almost as soon as my gaze landed on him, it leaped away. It was a while before I could look over there again. It was a dreadful sight.

He was lying twisted in a bizarre position, with his hands to his neck, as if struggling to pull off a collar that was pinching him. Gradually I went closer, as if hypnotized. I saw his open eyes fixed on a point somewhere under the table. His dirty vest was ripped at the throat. It looked as if the body had turned on itself, lost the fight and been killed. It made me feel cold with Horror—the blood froze in my veins and I felt as if it had withdrawn deep inside my body. Only yesterday I had seen this body alive.

My God, I mumbled, what happened?

Oddball shrugged.

I can’t get through to the Police, it’s the Czech network again.

I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and tapped out the number I knew from the television—997—and soon after an automated Czech voice responded. That’s what happens here. The signal wanders, with no regard for the national borders. Sometimes the dividing line between operators parks itself in my kitchen for hours on end, and occasionally it has stopped by Oddball’s house or on the terrace for several days. Its capricious nature is hard to predict.

You should have gone higher up the hill behind the house, I belatedly advised him.

He’ll be stiff as a board before they get here, said Oddball in a tone that I particularly disliked in him—as if he had all the answers. He took off his sheepskin coat and hung it on the back of a chair. We can’t leave him like that, he looks ghastly. He was our neighbor, after all.

As I looked at Big Foot’s poor, twisted body I found it hard to believe that only yesterday I’d been afraid of this Person. I disliked him. To say I disliked him might be putting it too mildly. Instead I should say that I found him repulsive, horrible. In fact I didn’t even regard him as a human Being. Now he was lying on the stained floor in his dirty underwear, small and skinny, limp and harmless. Just a piece of matter, which some unimaginable processes had reduced to a fragile object, separated from everything else. It made me feel sad, horrified, for even someone as foul as he was did not deserve death. Who on earth does? The same fate awaits me too, and Oddball, and the Deer outside; one day we shall all be nothing more than corpses.

I glanced at Oddball, in the hope of some consolation, but he was already busy making the rumpled bed, a shakedown on a dilapidated folding couch, so I did my best to comfort myself. And then it occurred to me that in a way Big Foot’s death might be a good thing. It had freed him from the mess that was his life. And it had freed other living Creatures from him. Oh yes, suddenly I realized what a good thing death can be, how just and fair, like a disinfectant, or a vacuum cleaner. I admit that’s what I thought, and that’s what I still think now.

Big Foot was my neighbor, our houses were only half a kilometer apart, yet I rarely had anything to do with him. Fortunately. Instead I used to see him from afar—his diminutive, wiry figure, always a little unsteady, would move across the landscape. As he went along, he’d mumble to himself, and sometimes the windy acoustics of the Plateau would bring me snippets of this essentially simple, unvarying monologue. His vocabulary mainly consisted of curses, onto which he tacked some proper nouns.

He knew every scrap of this terrain, for it seems he was born here and never went further than Kłodzko. He knew the forest well—what parts of it he could use to earn money, what he could sell and to whom. Mushrooms, blueberries, stolen timber, brushwood for kindling, snares, the annual off-road vehicle rally, hunting. The forest nurtured this little goblin. Thus he should have respected the forest, but he did not. One August, when there was a drought, he set an entire blueberry patch ablaze. I called the fire brigade, but not much could be saved. I never found out why he did it. In summer he would wander about with a saw, cutting down trees full of sap. When I politely admonished him, though finding it hard to restrain my Anger, he replied in the simplest terms: Get lost, you old crone. But more crudely than that. He was always up to a bit of stealing, filching, fiddling, to make himself extra cash; when the summer residents left a flashlight or a pair of pruning shears in the yard, Big Foot would instantly nose out an opportunity to swipe these items, which he could then sell off in town. In my view he should have received several Punishments by now, or even been sent to prison. I don’t know how he got away with it all. Perhaps there were some angels watching over him; sometimes they turn up on the wrong side.

I also knew that he poached by every possible means. He treated the forest like his own personal farm—everything there belonged to him. He was the pillaging type.

He caused me many a sleepless Night. I would lie awake out of helplessness. Several times I called the Police—when the telephone was finally answered, my report would be received politely, but nothing else would happen. Big Foot would go on his usual rounds, with a bunch of snares on his arm, emitting ominous shouts. Like a small, evil sprite, malevolent and unpredictable. He was always slightly drunk, and maybe that prompted his spiteful mood. He’d go about muttering and striking the tree trunks with a stick, as if to push them out of his way; he seemed to have been born in a state of mild intoxication. Many a time I followed in his tracks and gathered up the primitive wire traps he’d set for Animals, the nooses tied to young trees bent in such a way that the snared Animal would be catapulted up to hang in midair. Sometimes I found dead Animals—Hares, Badgers and Deer.

We must shift him onto the couch, said Oddball.

I didn’t like this idea. I didn’t like having to touch him.

I think we should wait for the Police, I said. But Oddball had already made space on the folding couch and was rolling up the sleeves of his sweater. He gave me a piercing look with those pale eyes of his.

You wouldn’t want to be found like that, would you? In such a state. It’s inhuman.

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

Wasn’t it a sinister paradox that now we had to deal with Big Foot’s body, that he’d left us this final trouble? Us, his neighbors whom he’d never respected, never liked, and never cared about?

To my mind, Death should be followed by the annihilation of matter. That would be the best solution for the body. Like this, annihilated bodies would go straight back into the black holes whence they came. The Souls would travel at the speed of light into the light. If such a thing as the Soul exists.

Overcoming tremendous resistance, I did as Oddball asked. We took hold of the body by the legs and arms and shifted it onto the couch. To my surprise I found that it was heavy, not entirely inert, but stubbornly stiff instead, like starched bed linen that has just been through the mangle. I also saw his socks, or what was on his feet in their place—dirty rags, foot wrappings made from a sheet torn into strips, now gray and stained. I don’t know why, but the sight of those wrappings hit me so hard in the chest, in the diaphragm, in my entire body, that I could no longer contain my sobbing. Oddball cast me a cold, fleeting glance, with distinct reproach.

We must dress him before they arrive, said Oddball, and I noticed that his chin was quivering too at the sight of this human misery (though for some reason he refused to admit it).

So first we tried to remove his vest, dirty and stinking, but it adamantly refused to be pulled over his head, so Oddball took an elaborate penknife from his pocket and cut the material to pieces across the chest. Now Big Foot lay half-naked before us on the couch, hairy as a troll, with scars on his chest and arms, covered in tattoos, none of which made any sense to me. His eyes squinted ironically while we searched the broken wardrobe for something decent to dress him in before his body stiffened for good and reverted to what it really was—a lump of matter. His torn underpants protruded from under brand-new silvery tracksuit bottoms.

Cautiously I unwound the repulsive foot wrappings, and saw his feet. They astonished me. I have always regarded the feet as the most intimate and personal part of our bodies, and not the genitals, not the heart, or even the brain, organs of no great significance that are too highly valued. It is in the feet that all knowledge of Mankind lies hidden; the body sends them a weighty sense of who we really are and how we relate to the earth. It’s in the touch of the earth, at its point of contact with the body that the whole mystery is located—the fact that we’re built of elements of matter, while also being alien to it, separated from it. The feet—those are our plugs into the socket. And now those naked feet gave me proof that his origin was different. He couldn’t have been human. He must have been some sort of nameless form, one of the kind that—as Blake tells us—melts

Reviews for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

[acia-11 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

From the start I was taken by the main protagonist who is a delight in her idiosyncrasies, strangeness, and vulnerability. She inhabits a landscape with other strange (yet recognizable) humans and in her slightly mad perspective bites into the landscape, animal protection, William Blake, society's structures and hypocrisies, astrogy, murder, human folly, friendship, and more.

[benjaminthelibrarian · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5 stars.

Finished this one a while ago but forgot to update it here. I liked the story and the characters, although there were times where I didn't know where the story was going, if anywhere. Overall I enjoyed it.

[booklove2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another trippy translated book. I'm realizing it is rare that a book translated into English are usually the weirder books I read. The main character here qualifies as odd. I'm not sure how much of this book is 1:1 relatable to the poet William Blake. If so, I don't know much about him, so not sure how that applies here. Not a great note here for a Nobel Prize winner, I will admit!

[technodiabla · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I listened to this in audiobook format.

This novel is about an old woman living in rural Poland. She lives a fairly solitary life doing astrology, translating William Blake, and admiring the forest animals. Meanwhile, a string of unusual murders wraps up her and her entire village in their mysteries. I enjoyed the main character-- her stubborn individuality and lack of concern for the opinions of others-- though her astrology obsession became tiresome for me at times. Despite there being several gruesome murders, this book is dryly humorous and has a certain warmth as a group of unlikely friends timidly forms. I loved the ending, even though you could see it coming from early in the book.

[marshakt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful, quirky book

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I simply don't know what to say about this oddity. Let me quote the NY Times Book Review: "A marvelously weird and fable-like mystery...a philosophical fairy tale about life and death..." That's good, except maybe for the "marvelous" part. Because there is SO much heavy-handed condemnation of humans who hunt or just eat animals, SO much astrology-gibberish that the intriguing mystery kind of gets short-changed. I admit I didn't see the reveal coming, and I think that may have been in part due to those distracting and detracting elements. Translated from the Polish.

[eglinton_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tale of odd happenings and eccentric folk, but the voice of the narrative carries it. Tokarczuk writes in an intriguing, imaginative style that keeps the reader on board. And thus even the harping-on about astrology - normally a complete turn-off - is readable. Hard to summarise what it’s about, or perhaps merely unnecessary, but there are plentiful challenging insights: Tokarczuk, apparently (according to my Polish work colleague), has ended up more or less exiled from Poland due to this nonconformity of thinking (and to the opposite tendency in mainstream Polish culture).

[fionaanne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Charmingly bizarre. This is the sort of book that appeals to only a certain type of reader and anyone else will hate it.

[lisapeet · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this for my book club and loved it—being now firmly in the older, cranky, animal-company-seeking lady demographic that, I'm discovering, has some wonderful representation in fiction. I've already bought a copy of this as a Christmas gift for a fellow cranky old animal loving friend, and recommended it to another (who will have much more love for the astrology component, which is not my thing in the least but I appreciated as an example of any method that we get attached to to help make sense of the world).

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a strange and wonderful book, a combination murder mystery, fairy tale, political polemic, and character study. That's a lot to cram into one column, and it took me quite a while to get deeply involved. The central character is an old Polish woman who cares at least as deeply for animals as for people, and who is a committed astrologer, convinced that the stars determine our lives and characters. She has friends (an odd group) but she also has enemies. As the novel progresses, it turns out to be operating on several levels, asking profound questions as well as the ones on the surface. When I first started listening, I didn't know if I would finish. By the time I had finished, I had ordered a physical book: I want to reread it, and there are many passages I want to highlight.

[gypsy_boy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyable light read but I agree with the others here who have commented that this is not indicative of Nobel-Prize-winning ability. The random capitalization (borrowed from William Blake) adds nothing, and even the focus/preoccupation with astrology is of less than compelling significance. All in all, pleasant but not much more. Time to figure out which book is next.

[japaul22 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead] is a novel that is hard to describe. On the surface, it's a murder mystery set in a small town in Poland on the border with the Czech Republic. It is winter and our aging narrator, Janina, is caring for her neighbors' properties, because only a few stay in this remote village over winter. People start dying in suspicious ways. Janina, who is an expert in astrology, suspects the Animals in their region, who are sick of being hunted and eaten by the local men.

Though you would expect that this dramatic-sounding story would be the obvious focal point of the book, it is not. Instead, it's a character study of the unreliable narrator, her neighbors and friends, and life in the village.

It's a unique novel and I see both why it's so respected and popular, and why it might not get glowing reviews across the board. It's a bit tough to know what you're supposed to be experiencing as a reader. But, I ended up really liking it.

[jklugman_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I honestly feel better knowing that someone like Olga Tokarczuk is out there writing novels like this. Her protagonist is kind of crazy--as evidenced by her obsession with astrology--but her observations puncture the smug, self-satisfying anthropocentric views that dominate Polish society (among others). A mystery serves as a loose unifying structure, as Duszejko (who prefers to go by her last name only) ponders a conspiracy of animals responsible for the deaths of hunters in her rural vilage, but the novel is really about her relationships with other people in the town and her literary, social and existential reflections.

[maryreinert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It took me a while to get into this. I especially couldn't get into the emphasis on astrology that the main character, a woman living alone in a small Polish village. During the winter months, she looks over the houses that are occupied in the summer. She is considered a strange woman who most ignore or look down upon. In the middle of the night, her neighbor wakes her to help with the body of another neighbor who has supposedly been murdered. She is sure that the deer have murdered him as he is a poacher.

As the story goes, more people die mysteriously, but she is sure that those deaths are caused by animals because all have somehow either killed or otherwise harmed animals. She writes to the authorities with her suspicions but obviously they are ignored.

As the story went on, I grew to like this strange woman. One of her friends is a translator of the works of William Blake, another man is a bug authority, another the neighbor she calls Odd Duck.

Unusual book. Odd in places, sort of a fairy tale in others.

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"The familiar cold, wet air that reminds us every winter that the world was not created for Mankind, and for at least half the year, it shows us how very hostile it is to us."

This book is a combination of a weird and fable-like fairy tale with a murder mystery. It is also very message-driven, as the author explores the ways in which some living creatures are privileged above others. Finally, it is an examination of how we stigmatize those who are "different."

Sixty-something Janina (she hates her name) lives in the mountains as the winter caretaker of vacation cottages. She has a reputation as a crank and obsessive animal-lover. She is interested in horoscopes, translating the poetry of William Blake, and nature. She gives everyone a name based on the characteristics she sees in them, so we have her neighbors Oddball and Big Foot, Dizzy, with whom she is collaborating in the Blake translation, Good News, a friend, and so on. When the novel opens, Oddball has discovered the body of Big Foot. Although Big Foot apparently choked on a bone, Janina begins to think he may have been murdered. There follow in quick succession a number of other deaths which clearly were homicides. One thing that connects the victims is that they were all hunters, so Janina tries to convince the police that they were all murdered by animals who are taking their revenge for the mistreatment of animals by hunters.

From this description, I think you can see that this book is original, inventive, and unusual. I enjoyed it very much. There were many sentences and phrases I highlighted, and Tokarczuk has created a unique and memorable character in Janina. I won't soon forget this book, and will definitely be reading more by this author.

4 stars

First line: "I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the night."

[jjordan3122 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

8/10 - Enjoyable read with plenty to think about.

Practically raced through Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. The reclusive Janina Duszejko (though don't you dare call her Janina), an elderly astrologist and animal rights activist, leads the reader through her life in a sparse village in rural Poland as she comments on everything and everything though, all the while, one gets the sense she's holding some things back.

She is particularly interested in a string of murders (all of them hunters from her village) and holds a strong suspicion she knows who -or what- is behind them. Though Duszejko waxes on about astrology in moments (fascinating, I'm sure, for those better versed than me), she remains an interesting and complicated character, leaving a strong impression on the reader. The twist at the end, while sparsely hinted to, feels particularly satisfying once the pieces come together.

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked this novel and the odd but endearing lady at the center of it. Since I only read the translation it’s hard to know, but I felt like the translation must have been very good, and a bit of a challenge.

[josephking6602 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I couldn’t get into the flow of this one…. Good writing, but i just didn’tfollow it

[castlelass · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is an atypical mystery where the focus is not so much on a string of disappearances and deaths as on the state of mind of the first-person narrator, Mrs. Duszejko (Mrs. D), a sixty-something woman who lives in a rural Polish village and attempts to “assist” the investigators. It starts with a neighbor’s death from choking but promptly moves into a close examination of Mrs. D’s inner world. She is a former engineer, currently working as a teacher of English and assisting a former student in translating William Blake’s poetry into Polish. There are numerous references to Blake throughout the novel, and his verse opens each chapter.

Mrs. D’s eccentricities include:

• • Preference for animals over humans
  
• • Belief that certain laws are immoral
  
• • Passion for astrology, how planets and star-signs rule a person’s fate
  
• • Strong aversion to hunting and what she sees as religious hypocrisy
  
• • Viewing the neighboring Czech Republic as a utopia of sorts
  

Readers will be able to tell that Mrs. D has issues, and these play a role in the plot. For the most part, her Ailments (as she calls them) are not spelled out but left up to the reader to decipher. This book poses philosophical questions that provide food-for-thought about the relationship between humans and animals. It explores the nature of the limits we place upon each other, and especially upon aging women.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I found it engrossing and was curious to see where it was headed. I tend to enjoy eccentric characters, and Mrs. D is quite a colorful individual. I liked her group of unusual friends, a group of fellow eccentrics, and could picture them sitting around a kitchen table, sipping cups of black tea, and discussing the goings on of the community. I enjoyed the descriptions of the Polish countryside in winter and what it is like to live in such harsh conditions. I learned several interesting facts about nature. I particularly liked the author’s expressive writing style (with credit to the translator, as I read the English translation from the original Polish). For example:
“We left the house and were instantly engulfed by the familiar cold, wet air that reminds us every winter that the world was not created for Mankind, and for at least half the year it shows us how very hostile it is to us. The frost brutally assailed our cheeks, and clouds of white steam came streaming from our mouths. The porch light went out automatically and we walked across the crunching snow in total darkness, except for Oddball’s headlamp, which pierced the pitch dark in one shifting spot, just in front of him, as I tripped along in the Murk behind him.”
On the other hand, if the author was going for social commentary, I do not think she succeeds, as some of her key points are contradicted through the characters’ actions. The logical result of these actions would be the opposite of what I believe is the intended message. It is hard to spell this out without spoilers. The subtle humor was a bit too dark for my personal taste and it contains rather gory and disturbing descriptions of deaths of people and animals. I am not sorry to have read it but felt a bit of a letdown at the end. If anyone is looking for a “literary mystery,” this book would be a good fit.

[janerawoof · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating different sort of murder mystery--story told by an eccentric old woman more devoted to animals than to people, an amateur astrologist, and with a neighbor, translator of William Blake from English to Polish. After the murders, the perpetrator's own words give us the who/how/why dunnit.
Very enjoyable and readable. I felt this translation to be very well done.

[alisony-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but found it an enjoyable read. I liked Tokarczuk's style of writing from the get go, the feisty older lady protagonist and the physicality of the setting described.

There's something about this book that makes it an odd kind of read. I think it's perhaps that the narrative is following the somewhat barmy, unreliable thoughts of the woman. It layers literary fiction with a noir thriller element and dark comedy. Sometimes it seems obvious where the plot is heading. At other times it sends you in different directions.

Overall I enjoyed it, but I'm not quite ready to sign up to the fan club just yet. The writing style really drew me in, but I felt a little flat by the end with where the plot went.

4 stars - definitely worth a read, but I don't feel it's going to stick with me for long.

[sriddell_8 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a stream of consciousness from a older woman Janina, living in a remote area of Poland, on the Czech border.

She's a vegetarian, astrologer, defender of animals, English teacher, friend to at least some of her neighbors. She's a caretaker to the vacation homes of the wealthy who return to Warsaw in the winter.

Janina's very disturbed by the hunting and poaching in the area. When some of the hunters start to die in mysterious circumstances, she makes a good case that these hunters have themselves been killed by deer or foxes or insects.

Janina is also helping to translate work from William Blake into Polish, and the title is a paraphrase of this proverb from William Blake: "In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and drive, over the bones of the dead. The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom." From the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

I would describe this a part philosophy, part indictment of rigid societal norms. A significant contrast is set between Janina and her neighbors: One set of behaviors is considered "good" or "normal", while Janina's more compassionate approach is considered "crazy" and "odd".

Definitely an interesting read!

[thornton37814 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Abandoned. I read about half of it, but I just couldn't get into it, and I did not enjoy the astrological theme in part of it. Life's too short to keep reading something you don't enjoy.

[colligan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

When I started this book I really wanted to like it. I had read numerous positive reviews. Moreover, it won a Nobel Prize! Then I began to read it and started to feel (with some guilt) that I didn't really like it. As I read on I started to wonder how I could give the book an honest review and/or rating. For god's sake, it won a Nobel Prize! I finished the book still not liking it. It just didn't work for me. Interesting, yes, at times. Creative, yes. Memorable, insightful, and well written, at times maybe. Based on public opinion, I think it's fair to conclude, it's probably me. Let's just say that it's a good thing that I don't sit on the Nobel Literature Committee. This last thought would probably be almost universally endorsed.

[pamelad_570511 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Only people who don't know her call the elderly Mrs Janina Dusjejko by her first name. She's never thought it belonged to her, and calls herself Duszejko. Other people, too, have names that don't fit, so she gives them names that do: Dizzy, Oddball, Good News, Bigfoot. She lives on an isolated plateau, so close to the Czech republic the phone signal is as likely to come from there as from Poland. In winter, she acts as caretaker for the holiday houses on the plateau, with Oddball and Bigfoot her closest neighbours.

When the story starts, Dusjejko, the narrator, has little to do with her neighbours, but that changes when Oddball calls her out in the middle of the night. Bigfoot is dead, choked to death on a bone from a deer he has killed and eaten. His death is followed by others, all of them hunters, so Dusjejko formulates the theory that the animals are taking revenge.

Dusjejko has an appealing voice: wry, funny and observant. She once built bridges in the Middle East, but her Ailments have limited her activity. Now she teaches English to primary school children one day a week, helps her friend Dizzy translate Blake into Polish, and casts horoscopes. Like Blake she has a mystical view of the natural world and animals are as important to her as people are.

This is a philosophical, comic crime investigation, with a pinch of politics and sociology. I loved it.

[overgaard-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

fabulously constructed, erudite, intriguing, and above all; satisfying as a work of fiction and of art

[nbmars · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The narrator of this quirky book is Janina Duszejko, an aging woman who lives in a rural Polish village near the Czech border. We learn from her that she is an avid astrologer with a penchant for translating William Blake’s poetry into Polish. The rather bizarre title of the book is a quote from Blake’s equally bizarre Proverbs of Hell.

As the book begins, her neighbor Big Foot, a frequent hunter, is found dead in his home by Janina's friend Oddball. From Janina and Oddball's inspection of the scene, it seems Big Foot choked on a bone while eating. Janina also finds a shocking photograph in Big Foot's house, the nature of which is not revealed until the penultimate chapter. Janina disliked Big Foot because she disagreed with hunting animals. She began to believe that animals could have killed Big Foot out of vengeance. She wrote to the local police, who ignored her theory. The police commandant – called the Commandant by Janina – is also a hunter and is later found dead beside his car by Janina’s friend Dizzy. The Commandant's death emboldens Janina's beliefs, but her friends Dizzy and Oddball are skeptical of them. Janina is questioned by police as a witness to the crime scene. One officer accuses Janina of seemingly valuing the life of animals more than that of humans. Janina tells them that she values both equally.

But she also believes that “Animals show the truth about a country. If people behave brutally towards animals, no form of democracy is ever going help them, in fact nothing will at all.”

Meanwhile, the mishaps continue. The village's wealthy fur farmer and brothel owner, Innerd, goes missing. An entomologist named Borys–spelled "Boros" by Janina – comes to the village. He is researching endangered beetles and hopes to convince the Polish government to protect them from extinction. Janina likes Boros and allows him to move in with her. The two eventually become romantically involved. Innerd is later found dead in the forest, with an animal snare around his leg. Weeks later, “the President,” leader of a local social club and also a hunter, is found dead, covered in beetles.

A new Catholic chapel is opened in the village headed by Father Rustle, a local Catholic priest and avid hunter. In one of his sermons, Father Rustle praises hunters, calling them "ambassadors and partners of the Lord God in the work of creation." Janina interrupts the sermon, yelling at Rustle and the rest of the villagers. She asks, "Have you fallen asleep? How can you listen to such nonsense without batting an eyelid? Have you lost your minds? Or your hearts? Have you still got hearts?" Days later, the presbytery burns down and Father Rustle is found dead.

In the end, all is revealed and a kind of justice is served.

(JAB)

[alexbolding · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well plotted novel about an amateur astrologist cum animal lover, who grieves over the loss of her ‘two girls’, while it seems the animals around her are on a killing spree among elderly men in her neighbourhood. She is a retired engineer, who teaches some English at a local primary school, and translates poems of Blake jointly with an ex student of her (Dizzy) who is equally marginalised from mainstream society despite his (IT) job at the local Police. Otherwise she looks after a number of summer cottages on a forested plateau on the border with the Czech republic.

During winter, it is only she and two solitary men, Big Foot and Oddball, who stay on, in their respective cottages. Then Big Foot is found dead in his kitchen, surrounded by remains of one deer, with a deer bone choking his throat – was he killed by the deer? Or did he simply die while gorging on a deer he shot? It is the start of a series of tragic events that leads to the discovery of violent deaths of the Police Commandant, rich fox farmer Innards, local retired MP and chairman of the local hunting lodge, and finally the local priest whose church is consumed by fire. Gradually the woman’s role in this spree of murders changes from alternative investigator and source of information, to weird madwoman with strange ideas about animals taking revenge on hunters, to main suspect, to… In the process of the on-going investigations, she establishes closer ties with Oddball, Dizzy, and a woman called Good News, who runs a local clothes store. She also hosts a weird entomologist who investigates a rare type of beetle, common on the plateau. In the end it becomes clear who the two Little Girls are, what their role in the story is, and what might have caused the death of all these old men.

I can see why everybody likes Olga T, and how she became eligible for the Nobel Prize for Literature, though I do not think she is of the same stature as some writers, who did not get the Prize (like Phillip Roth, but hey, she is still an awesome writer, certainly compared to Bob Dylan!). Some aspects of her style feel very familiar because I share her convictions and style conventions (like the use of nick names; the observation that someone who uses the combination ‘In truth’ virtually every other sentence, is likely to be a liar, etc.).

[bell7_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Janina - she does hate her name, it doesn't suit her - lives on the plateau year-round and checks in on the houses of those who come up only in the summer. It's winter, and one of her two neighbors dies, apparently choking on the bone of a deer he was eating. Janina feels this deeply, particularly because she hates cruelty to animals, and when other mysterious deaths occur, she's convinced that the animals themselves are taking revenge, if only she can get someone to listen.

How to summarize such a book? It's been called a mystery, and there is a mystery, but it's more of a character study. Janina narrates, and we come to know her in all her eccentricities: loving animals more than humans, convinced that astrology has the answers to everything, and increasingly frustrated that her voice is not heard. As a reader, I found her sympathetic, even in all her oddities, and the denouement was less of a surprise than an inevitability.

[lady_lazarus · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

For me this was a nice read, nothing extraordinary. Language was beautiful and the theme of hypocrisy is something I feel important in the society. The plot, however, didn't get my sympathies... I felt for the main protagonist, loosing her dogs, which were her family, and no one being held responsible for it by the society. While she was not religious, she was spiritual and believed in astrology and the influence of nature on life. Although I have nothing against astrology, I found that this aspect was somewhat poorly represented in the book. It felt somehow forced and not even necessary. Well, perhaps one could argue that one of the themes was comparison of conventional (catholic) religion to the other, often overlooked forms, of spirituality, but still I think this spirituality would have worked better with more subtle tones and without astrology. I was also craving more of magical realism -vibes to the story and would have been more delighted if it wouldn't have turned out as a rather conventional revenge/murder story.