Olga Tokarczuk

Finalist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. 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, and autonomy and fate.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air. 

For people my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belindes are no longer there. The places od their childhood and youth have ceasws to exist, the villages where they went on holidays, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafes and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside of it anymore. I have nowhere to return to. 

From nature’s point of view, no creatures are useful or not useful. That’s just a foolish distinction applied by people. 

In any case, I know the date of my own death, and that lets me feel free. 

As I gazed at the black-and-white landscape of the Plateau I realised that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence. 

sarah

I stopped in the sloping market square, and gradually I felt flooded by a powerful sense of communion with the people passing by. Each man was my brother and each woman my sister. We were so very much alike. So fragile, impermanent, and easily destroyed. 

isabellaargote

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 am a phantom built out of pain. Whenever I find it hard to know what to do with myself, I imagine I have a zip fastener in my belly, from my neck to my groin, and that I'm slowly undoing it, from top to bottom. And then I pull my arms out of my arms, my legs out of my legs, and take my head off my head. As I extract myself from my own body, it falls off me like old clothes. Underneath them I'm finer, soft, almost transparent. I have a body like a Jellyfish, white, milky, phosphorescent. Oh yes, then I am free. 

eileen lee

A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us.

The prison is not outside, but inside each of us. Perhaps we simply don't know how to live without it.

aywen

But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.

Før plogen din over de dødes knokler

Erin O’Donnell

Everything will pass. The wise man knows this from the start, and has no regrets.

WINNER OF THE 2018 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE With Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, International Booker Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk returns with a subversive, entertaining noir novel. In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She is reclusive, preferring the company of animals to people; she's unconventional, believing in the stars; and she is fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, Duszejko becomes involved in the investigation. By no means a conventional crime story, this existential thriller by 'one of Europe's major humanist writers' (Guardian) offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalized people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination - and caused a genuine political uproar in Tokarczuk's native Poland.

Sasha Maiboroda

Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism — it ages.

Catarina

A subversive, entertaining noir novel from the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

erin alise 

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 . . .

Najara Valente

ingenious; was compelled enough by the moments of compressed emotional clarity to keep going through the meandering and then everything explodes in the last 10,000 words or so. just so good.

chris

category is kooky unreliable women but its really just about ecofeminism at its core. 

Classic unreliable narrator but it’s actually just an environmentalist old lady so who can even blame her, she made all her besties fall in love with her and they took care of her cute

jillian tenner

So glad I brought this with me on the trip

deacon

Emily Wisnesky

not a bad book, i just didn’t find the whole entirety of the book interesting enough for me 😭

Olga Tokarczuk does everything I have ever wanted in a book here. She capitalizes Unnecessary Words, uses an obscene, albeit necessary, amount of frivolous commas, which is great, and I enjoy it. This Book also does a lot with expanding Tropes and Common Ideas into new zones. Loved this one.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

Lindy

We Have Always Lived in the Castle but make it ecofeminist? I regret reading Flights shortly before this, as I am still hungover on the author's particular brand of woo and this tempered my experience of this novel.

We follow our quirky narrator (single woman around 60) who dislikes her name, so she doesn’t use it often. She also feels other people don’t have good names, so she has a nickname for nearly every person and animal in her life. She likes animals much more than humans. She also thinks everything can be explained with horoscopes and astrology.

The book is set in a very rural area of Poland near the Czech border.

The protagonist is I think around 60, lives on her own and checks on the houses nearby that are only used in the summer to keep herself busy. She lives on a plateau above a village that is icy and or snowy for several months a year and hard to get to and out of without a car.

After witnessing her next door neighbor dead she comes up with a theory that the animals in the forest have come to kill bad humans. This theory is not well liked or appreciated by the police.

She is a very interesting protagonist, because she is a single woman so her life doesn’t revolve around being a wife or mother. She also lives in a rural area so remote that it makes sense she is in tune with nature.

The end is very interesting. The whole book was very interesting and one of the reasons I love reading books by authors who live in the country they write about.

Suzanne

translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones

We follow our quirky narrator (single woman around 60) who dislikes her name, so she doesn’t use it often. She also feels other people don’t have good names, so she has a nickname for nearly every person and animal in her life. She likes animals much more than humans. She also thinks everything can be explained with horoscopes and astrology.

The book is set in a very rural area of Poland near the Czech border.

The protagonist is I think around 60, lives on her own and checks on the houses nearby that are only used in the summer to keep herself busy. She lives on a plateau above a village that is icy and or snowy for several months a year and hard to get to and out of without a car.

After witnessing her next door neighbor dead she comes up with a theory that the animals in the forest have come to kill bad humans. This theory is not well liked or appreciated by the police.

She is a very interesting protagonist, because she is a single woman so her life doesn’t revolve around being a wife or mother. She also lives in a rural area so remote that it makes sense she is in tune with nature.

The end is very interesting. The whole book was very interesting and one of the reasons I love reading books by authors who live in the country they write about.

I loved her since she pulled big foot ID just to complete his natal chart but this ending made it even better

anastasia

i love kooky, off putting female characters 

Alice S 

Francine Corry

When the first lists for upcoming releases of 2019 were published Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was included and I was intrigued. I couldn't resist a book which is described thusly on Goodreads:

An ingenious variation on murder noir, set in motion by a string of bizarre deaths in an isolated village, from a Man Booker International Prize-winning author and National Book Award finalist.

So I did the preorder and eagerly awaited. Add to that an eccentric elderly woman, it made it irresistible to me. But then I began to get to know Janina, who lived alone in a village which was unpopulated in the winter. Janina is funny and at first seems delightful:

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.

With age, many men come down with 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.

But soon her stream of consciousness craziness wore on me and began to seem tedious and endless. 

Obviously it has received high accolades, but I admit to a sense of regret of having chosen to read this.

Cody Degen

iamazoo

this book is so beautiful and meditative. kind of a slow burn as far as “murder mysteries” go, but everything wraps up *exquisitely* and the ending is totally worth it.

Shrini S

** spoiler alert **
           Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means ‘the dropping of petals’. The world has dropped its petals.

Laura Mauler

I was waiting for the right time to read this book, which I thought would be Fall but was actually Winter. Perfect book for when the nighttime comes at 4pm.

Lisa Lindquist 

altlovesbooks

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

Maybe I'm not smart enough for literary fiction in some cases, but this just felt boring and tedious. Janina is an elderly Polish woman who loves her astrology and animals, and quickly becomes irritated with people who don't share her extremely inflexible morals where killing (for sport, for food, for necessity) is concerned. When neighbors and villagers start turning up dead under mysterious (and sometimes violent) circumstances, Janina thinks she has it all figured out, but nobody listens to the crazy hermit who lives out in the woods. 

The book's written in a stream of consciousness style through Janina's eyes, so there's entire sections of the book that really don't relate to anything. She's a bit of an oddball, sends polite registered letters to the local cops asking them to check with their force's astrologer about the murders, and does other kooky old-person-cum-dorky-detective things you'd expect. Unfortunately the author does a great job of hammering home who the culprit is almost from the beginning, and even I was able to point to the right person around 15-20% in, so it's not really much of a mystery.

It also felt kind of preachy in some places, particularly when Janina goes off (mentally) about animal slaughter and environmental problems and such. I can't tell how much of that is character-driven and how much of that is author-driven, but it came off like a finger waggy school lesson in some places. These are all real issues, but a mystery novel feels like the wrong venue for trying to get your message across. 

I don't know, I didn't connect much with this book. For a Nobel Prize winner, I expected something a bit more compelling. Instead I got a lot of dead air passages where I found myself mentally checking out until Janina (mentally) found the thread of where she was going plot-wise again. There's the bones (heh) of a good, dark story here, but I felt like they were buried under way too much meaningless meanderings and social commentary.

Here is a true story. Right at the big climax, I had a seizure. They took me to the hospital and didn't bring the book with me. How agonizing! Luckily, everything is fine and I was able to successfully finish the book.

Minjae

I enjoyed some of this book but skimmed often as well (I can't get that interested in astrology, sorry). I loved the "twist" that I also saw coming. The ending was a little meh, though, and I didn't really have much to reflect on by the end. Other than this could be an extremist Vegetarian manifesto.

Katelyn Caillouet

The first novel I read in many years. Helped me to love fiction again. 

Katherine Sanchez

Fran Lewis

Striking prose with a fully-formed main character, layered and particular. The plot is slow, but it’s well worth a read. The treatment of fate, justice, and loneliness in this novel is unlike any I have ever seen before.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

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