Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel Paperback – August 11, 2020

This is a highly entertaining read, a tale of “frontier justice” not to be missed! The first person narrator is a quirky, ironic, and remarkably lovable character owing to her courage, candor, and commitment to her ideals. The juxtaposition of dear friends and mortal enemies creates a tension both arresting and humorous. Add Olga Tokarczuk to a long list of Nobel Prize winners familiar with the works of Emanuel Swedenborg!

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!