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

Sly, peculiar and quite funny.This novel by a recent winner of the Nobel for Literature is structured as a murder mystery and features a quite peculiar protagonist. The narrator is an older woman who is living deep in a forest, a rural, resort community in Poland near its frontier border with the Czech Republic. She lives there year round, and during the winter months she makes the rounds as a sort of caretaker that looks after several nearby vacation homes in the off-season. She also has a part-time gig teaching the local schoolchildren who want to learn English.Her favorite poet is William Blake, and there is a snippet of Blake’s visionary poetry at the head it’s starting every chapter. Due to health reasons, she no longer practices her original profession, which was Civil Engineering. Her main intellectual preoccupation is with astrology. The funniest passage is one where she and two male friends smoke some weed and start expounding on the theme of why there is Evil in the world. This is in the wake of the discovery of additional murders carried out in rather gruesome fashion. In Blake’s cosmology, of course, Evil is inherent, a legacy of the Fall. Our astrologer assures them that in fact Evil is due to the influence of Saturn on human affairs. Several additional explanations are proferred — this is certainly the philosophical conundrum that all organized Religions grapple with. No, it is definitely Saturn, according to our intrepid guide to these bizarre events.The novel opens with the discovery that one of her neighbors has died, apparently in a gristly accident. One of the peculiarities of the heroine is that she calls most of her friends and neighbors by descriptive nicknames: the original murder victim is Big Foot, her closest neighbor in the forest is Oddball, a lively young woman that runs a local thrift store frequented by the narrator is Good News. A young colleague that she collaborates with in translating Blake’s poetry into Polish is Dizzy.Darkly entertaining, deeply disturbing, and quite resonant. Excellent!

This book is a little offbeat, a little different but a good read.At a nominal level, it’s a murder mystery, but I would not buy the book for that reason.Mostly, the book is a philosophical musing on living and people and the hard lessons learned by an elderly, solitary woman. These are highly engaging with many highlighted text portions full of debatable wisdom.The people in the book are fully drawn, interesting and make for an easy reading experience.There are two drawbacks. First, our protagonist engages in long themed rants about hunting and animal cruelty. While organic and natural to the character the theme is not subtle and seems overplayed.Second, while of some interest, the extensive focus on astrology (and therefore predestination) also seems to consume a lot of space in the book but without either an educational angle or a tie-in to the other themes in the book. But, my fault, perhaps I missed some relevant angle.I recommend highly with those two reservations in mind.

Kudos to the author, and, just as importantly, the translator. Both did magnificent work. Dark, lyrical , and completely immersive.One of the catchwords I despise is “unputdownable”. The inexcusable grammar not only hurts my ears, but is (in my experience) a lie. While I won’t use that word, let me just say I was putting the book down only when Life demanded it. Which is why it took me two days to read as opposed to the 3 1/2 to 4 hours it normally would have taken. Which was a blessing. Reading this book demands a bit slower pace. Only because of the sheer brilliance of the writing.I highlighted probably 70% of the book. Try to get through 10 pages without being flattened by a few sentences that give you chills from their insight into our own lives, as well as our world.Again, a huge thank you to the translator, for bringing such an incredibly beautiful work into English. It breaks my heart to think of how many books that must exist, yet lie and obscurity, except for the Saint of a person who takes on the job in order to touch as many people as possible.Not much more I can say, but this: Well done… Very well don

So you know how sometimes a book is fine and you enjoy it well enough when you’re reading it and could think of good things to say about it but it never actually hooks you? That’s what this was, for me. It’s narrated by Janina, an eccentric older woman living in a tiny Polish hamlet just over the border from the Czech Republic. Janina is a bit of a weirdo, working in her spare time to translate William Blake into Polish (from whence the title comes) and casting horoscopes as a serious practitioner of astrology. The story begins when she and a neighbor discover a man who lives near them dead, having choked on a bone during a meal. His is just the first death in a series that begins to strike in the local area, which passionate animal-rights advocate Janina attributes to revenge by animals against known hunters and poachers. It’s not quite a murder mystery since I feel like that implies some level of investigation beyond searching a natal chart for signs that the victims would have violent encounters by animals, but the murders do provide the plot’s forward momentum. Janina herself is a well-drawn character, and an unusual protagonist (an older lady, kind of kooky) in a way that feels refreshing. The prose is clever and engaging, but I think it’s the style choice that defeated my attempts to get fully into it: like Blake, Tokarczuk uses capitalization in non-standard ways and it kept breaking up my ability to get into a flow with it even once I figured out it was a Blake reference. I really wish this had worked better for me but I’ll definitely read her work again in the future!