Olga Tokarczuk

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

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.

lami

I disliked him. To say I disliked him might be putting it too mildly. Instead I should say that I found him repulsive, horrible. In fact I didn’t even regard him as a human Being.

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

lambie

Anger always leaves a void behind it, into which a flood of sorrow pours instantly, and keeps on flowing like a great river, without beginning or end. My tears came; once again their sources were replenished. 

It occurred to me if there really was a Good God, he should appear now in his true shape, as a Sheep, Cow, or Stag, and thunder in a mighty tone, he should roar, and if he could not appear in person, he should send his vicars, his fiery archangels, to put an end to this terrible hypocrisy for once and for all. But of course no one intervened. He never intervenes. 

“I thought that you, as a Writer, had an imagination and a capacity for conjecture, and were not closed to ideas that at first glance seem improbable. You should know that everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth.” 

“I’d never have written a single line if I didn’t have my feet firmly on the ground, Mrs Duszejko” 

For a time I slept with a Protestant (…) and he told me, probably quoting Luther, that he who suffers sees the back of God. I wondered if this meant the shoulders, or the buttocks perhaps, and what this divine back looked like, since we’re incapable of imagining the front. Maybe it meant he who suffers has a special access to God, by a side door, he is blessed, he embraces some sort of truth which without suffering would be hard to comprehend. So in a way the only Person who’s healthy is the one who suffers, however strange it might sound. I think that would be in harmony with the rest. 

That’s what I dislike most of all in people — cold irony. It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. Like an impotent man who can’t experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others. Cold irony is Urizen’s basic weapon. The armaments of impotence. At the same time the ironists always have a world outlook that they proclaim triumphantly, though if one starts badgering and questioning them about the details, it turns out to consist of nothing but trivia and banalities. 

“I am simply informing the Police that the man is committing evil. Where am I to go, if not to the Police?”

“Evil, you say? Maybe you should go to the priest!” 

“How can God be listening to all the prayers in the entire world simultaneously? And what if they contradict each other? Does he have to listen to the prayers of all these bastards, devils and bad people? Do they pray? Are there places where this God is absent?”

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

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 . . .

paola montepiedra

Started this because of Pedro Pascal, finished it because it was good. 

Daniel U

I know it’s only the beginning of the year, but this was one of the books I was most excited to read in 2025 — and no, it’s not only because I already started this book in December, and brought it over with me into the New Year with a desperate need to finish it finally. I first heard of Tokarczuk around fall time last year on Tiktok, in a video comparing her work to that of Ottessa Moshfegh, which I’ve been interesting in for quite a while now but was never in the mood for — so I decided to check out the so-called OG then, and boy how right I was about that. (Not a diss at Moshfegh, I was just really impressed with this book — I still haven’t given Moshfegh a try, so what do I know.)

What I was immediately taken with about this one was the writing style. Throughout the story I had the sneaking suspicion that Tokarczuk was blessed with the gift of using all the right words, in all the right order to make her points meet you beautifully dressed. The final product is an extremely gorgeous and picturesque prose that keeps your imagination going, beautiful descriptions that simultaneously walk off the page and somehow still keep feeling almost mysterious. 

Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead

 deals with subjects and characters that I don’t engage with regularly, be it intentional or not. Our main character and first-person narrator, the elderly Polish woman Janina Duszejko is an avid Astrologer (not something I can strongly relate to or find particularly interesting in other circumstances, but I think Astrology was a nice tool here to tie and connect different ideas together), an ex-bridge engineer now English teacher, translator of William Blake, and a friend of a colorful group of individuals, a lady whose pockets are full of opinionated Theories and Hypotheses about everything and everyone, and probably feels in this world the most passionate about the welfare of the Animals of the Plateau, the scene where our story takes place. She speaks through a fresh and unique point of view on life so firmly that it will inevitably make you question and re-evaluate your own at some points. 

The novel starts and ends in the aftermath of a murder, because at the end of the day, this is a crime story, a mystery by genre. Though it was not its essence for me, still a sense of who-dunnit lingers in the background of it all. We follow Janina for about a year as she tends to the vacation homes of wealthy city residents during the Winter, visits random townsfolk, files complaints to the police, and spends peaceful days-in with her once-student Dizzy translating the poetry of Blake, all the while people keep dropping like flies, and the police dismiss Janina’s claims that it’s the Animals finally taking their revenge on hunters as the delusions of an old, crazy woman, because it does sound a bit silly, doesn’t it? Well, Janina has the charm to make, if not the police, but the readers second guessing.

I found Janina’s philosophies and values very interesting to read about, especially after seeing 

, where I learned the novel sparked conversations around animal rights and hunting laws in Poland. It retroactively added that much more merit to her character for me, and I found the juxtaposition of a character that represents the activist’ values in the story being someone who is written off as absurd, misguided, and eccentric by her environment (even those closest to her, like Dizzy and Oddball are hesitant to even just entertain her ideals) a brilliantly ironic choice. 

Along with the beautiful writing, I found Janina a very skillful execution of an unreliable narrator, as through her misguided recollection of events you had the chance to grow to empathise with her and her position enough to be completely thrown off at the end of the novel, not by just the final reveal in the murder mystery plot itself, but also in the way that you try to question and moralise the situation when you close the book and evaluate and recount all that has just happened. 

I know it’s only the beginning of the year, but this was one of the books I was most excited to read in 2025 — and no, it’s not only because I already started this book in December, and brought it over with me into the New Year with a desperate need to finish it finally. I first heard of Tokarczuk around fall time last year on Tiktok, in a video comparing her work to that of Ottessa Moshfegh, which I’ve been interesting in for quite a while now but was never in the mood for — so I decided to check out the so-called OG then, and boy how right I was about that. (Not a diss at Moshfegh, I was just really impressed with this book — I still haven’t given Moshfegh a try, so what do I know.)

What I was immediately taken with about this one was the writing style. Throughout the story I had the sneaking suspicion that Tokarczuk was blessed with the gift of using all the right words, in all the right order to make her points meet you beautifully dressed. The final product is an extremely gorgeous and picturesque prose that keeps your imagination going, beautiful descriptions that simultaneously walk off the page and somehow still keep feeling almost mysterious. 

Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead deals with subjects and characters that I don’t engage with regularly, be it intentional or not. Our main character and first-person narrator, the elderly Polish woman Janina Duszejko is an avid Astrologer (not something I can strongly relate to or find particularly interesting in other circumstances, but I think Astrology was a nice tool here to tie and connect different ideas together), an ex-bridge engineer now English teacher, translator of William Blake, and a friend of a colorful group of individuals, a lady whose pockets are full of opinionated Theories and Hypotheses about everything and everyone, and probably feels in this world the most passionate about the welfare of the Animals of the Plateau, the scene where our story takes place. She speaks through a fresh and unique point of view on life so firmly that it will inevitably make you question and re-evaluate your own at some points. 

The novel starts and ends in the aftermath of a murder, because at the end of the day, this is a crime story, a mystery by genre. Though it was not its essence for me, still a sense of who-dunnit lingers in the background of it all. We follow Janina for about a year as she tends to the vacation homes of wealthy city residents during the Winter, visits random townsfolk, files complaints to the police, and spends peaceful days-in with her once-student Dizzy translating the poetry of Blake, all the while people keep dropping like flies, and the police dismiss Janina’s claims that it’s the Animals finally taking their revenge on hunters as the delusions of an old, crazy woman, because it does sound a bit silly, doesn’t it? Well, Janina has the charm to make, if not the police, but the readers second guessing.

I found Janina’s philosophies and values very interesting to read about, especially after seeing Dua Lipa in conversation with Tokarczuk, where I learned the novel sparked conversations around animal rights and hunting laws in Poland. It retroactively added that much more merit to her character for me, and I found the juxtaposition of a character that represents the activist’ values in the story being someone who is written off as absurd, misguided, and eccentric by her environment (even those closest to her, like Dizzy and Oddball are hesitant to even just entertain her ideals) a brilliantly ironic choice. 

Along with the beautiful writing, I found Janina a very skillful execution of an unreliable narrator, as through her misguided recollection of events you had the chance to grow to empathise with her and her position enough to be completely thrown off at the end of the novel, not by just the final reveal in the murder mystery plot itself, but also in the way that you try to question and moralise the situation when you close the book and evaluate and recount all that has just happened. 

highlighted a lot of passages from this book which is rare for me. some top writing and poignant themes. beginning and end were great, middle a struggle. I’m sure if I’d been able to maintain focus I would’ve enjoyed it more and rated it higher 

Amalie

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "A brilliant literary murder mystery." —Chicago Tribune "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." —Annie Proulx 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 . . . 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, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

A Novel

It was random and sort of hard to read for 250 pages which was a great writing style that matched Duszenko well, then loved where it went with the last 30 pages. I love it when you start to see something coming

Finn James

Quirky old woman, astrology, mystery, & some great life advice/wisdom.

Poppy Keogh

instant favourite from the first 10 pages

𝒦

Not sure if I loved or didn’t love. Janina is a jks hun

Allegrachatterjee

rachel

Probably one of the most peculiar novels you will read. Regardless, a really impressive whodunnit. 

Frederik De Bosschere

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.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

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