Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

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.

Strong writing. A world unfamiliar. An impassioned vision. You will need to make your personal moral decision.

The crazy wisdom of William Blake inspires this feminist ecological noir. What a mashup! Inspiring, funny, unforgettable.

This was a book club read for me–I knew nothing about it before beginning. I was immediately taken by the narrator, who has an incredible voice: dark, funny, philosophical, crazy. Although I enjoyed her, nothing much seemed to happen at first–but then the things did get suspenseful, and I couldn’t put the book down. Awesome, awesome story. Different from anything else I’ve ever read.

from Orion, Winter 2019

IN OLGA TOKARCZUK’S newly translated novel, one man chokes on a bone while eating venison. Another tumbles head first into a well. A trap ensnares a third. The men have nothing in common except for their geographic proximity and penchant for hunting or treating animals with cruelty or casual disregard. Tokarczuk’s narrator, an elderly woman named Janina Duszejko (but don’t call her that, please), tries to convince authorities, who are inclined to think the deaths are accidental, that the cause is “Animals taking revenge on people.”

Tokarczuk constructed her Booker Prize–winning Flights of fragments, revolving around journeys, both inward and outward. Compared to the nonlinear Flights, Drive Your Plow appears to have a more conventional narrative structure, that of a murder mystery. But Tokarczuk riffs on standard mystery tropes, paying less attention to the crimes than she does to the natural world of her story, animal rights, and society’s stigmatization of people who are not “hooked on being the same as the others.”

Janina has a keen, attentive mind, and she doesn’t place much stock in things that most people value. For example, she doesn’t reveal her preretirement occupation until halfway through the book. “By profession I am a bridge construction engineer— have I mentioned that already?” Tokarczuk writes.

Instead of fixating on the money, gossip, status, and power that hold others in thrall, Janina is attuned to everything she sees as natural, and is repulsed by everything she considers affected. She prefers young children, when they are “openminded and unpretentious,” before they “succumb to the power of reason.” A vegetarian, she studies forest creatures during her lengthy walks, and pines for her missing dogs, whom she calls “my Little Girls.” She suspects a local hunter targeted them. Above all, Janina believes in astrology, and is convinced everyone’s fate is written in the stars. She studies the TV schedule for cosmic correspondences, and writes letters to the authorities citing the horoscopes of the dead men, which she believes explain everything. Readers understand that the cops, who condescend to Janina, take the letters as symptoms of her dottiness.

Although Janina’s concerns, like hunters shooting indiscriminately in the area, seem reasonable, when she speaks to police, they treat her as though she is insane, largely because she leads an unconventional life. Throughout the novel, Tokarczuk invites readers to consider what behaviors prompt society to label one person mad and another sane, and whether these labels are justified.

Janina belongs to the great tradition of first-person narrators who, like Huck Finn and Mattie Ross, take the reins of the story with the force of their personalities. Janina frequently declares that she has “a Theory” about various phenomena. She eschews “official first names and surnames” because “No one ever remembers them, they’re so divorced from the Person, and so banal that they don’t remind us of them at all.” She prefers “epithets that come to mind of their own accord the first time I see a Person.” She finds some men difficult to converse with and ascribes it to her theory of “testosterone autism” — “the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts.” Socially awkward men are common and considered normal, but older women who question society’s structure and demand change are deemed eccentric.

Janina is unreliable in terms of reporting the complete, exact facts in a standard order, but she unfailingly delves into the essence of the matter. As Janina observes, “The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing.” By the end of the book, Tokarczuk proves this statement true about the cops and town residents and, most likely, the readers, who may be surprised when the culprit of the murders is revealed.

Jenny Shank’s short story collection, “Mixed Company,” won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and will be published by Texas Review Press in October 2021. Her first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award. She’s on the faculty of the Mile-High MFA at Regis University in Denver.

LOVE THIS

I read a description of this book that called it a “murder mystery”. And in the beginning, it seems to start out that way, but as the book goes on, I would not describe it as such. It was not suspenseful, but I was fully intrigued by the main character. I enjoyed reading it.

4.8 Stars, especially for the last several chapters. Part comedy, part tragedy – I really enjoyed this story. Each of the main characters brought something fresh to the book. Fine writing and a nice twist at the end.

A quirky story with almost dystopian undercurrents that prompts you to continue reading to discover the solution.

Wonderful tale of a woman who “gets” animals in a Temple Grandin way.