Review: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The publisher description/advertising makes this book sound like a murder mystery, and while the murder mystery aspect does happen (and is really felt in the ending), about 200+ pages is spent ruminating in the thoughts of an eccentric elderly woman who lives alone in the woods of Poland and obsesses over horoscopes, William Blake's poetry, the right to life of animals, and how the alignment of the planets in the sky led to last night's murder victim really being offed by a herd of deer.

I would tack the writing up there with Lolita in the category of "I'm not sure if I empathize with this character and I feel strange thinking about it." Janina is a lady who I would normally ignore if I were to ever encounter her in real life. As it turns out she has an insightful view into how humans work, but this frequently gets lost in the midst of her rants on astrology and sentient animals out to get us all.

By the ending I had a better grasp on how I felt about her (there is indeed a method to the madness), but the journey getting there was weird. There are some genuinely beautiful moments in this otherwise dark narrative-- reflections on the life of a lonely societal outcast with strong convictions. But it takes some getting used to and I didn't feel quite prepared for the first half given the above. I think this would definitely benefit from a re-read later.

I also had my mind in a loop at one moment trying to make sense of several English translations of several Polish translations of an English poem that were treated as if I were actually reading the Polish versions of the poem but with English words.

I don't necessarily recommend this book for everyone, but if you find any of the above interesting then you might get a kick out of it. Make of that what you will.

(Tangent but I knew I liked William Blake's art already and the experience of this is telling me I need to catch up with his poetry. The Proverbs of Hell in particular feature heavily in this work.)

(Tangent #2: Just found out there's a theater adaptation in Europe that looks really interesting.)