Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

 

The title, taken from a
poem by William Blake
is as bleak and as
beautiful as the prose
inside

Olga Tokarczuk was a clinical psychologist from the University of Warsaw, until her writing started to receive critical acclaim, and she quit psychology to concentrate on literature, stating that she felt "more neurotic than my clients".

Her best-known work is probably the Book of Jacob, but Drive Your Plow was shortlisted for the International Booker after it was translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It was a best seller in Poland and has been translated into numerous other languages. Tokarczuk has also been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Drive Your Plow follows Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her 60s who lives alone in an isolated valley near the Czech-Polish border. She investigates (much to the local police's chagrin) a series of grisly crimes. 

It is an unusual book, partly straddling the border between genre and literary fiction. The centre of the plot is a dark mystery: who is killing the local men, and why. And it is intriguing, the snow and deep forest seem reminiscent of Scandinoir, and actually I would say Tokarczuk creates a better atmosphere than many best sellers in this genre.

But it is more than a page turner. Janina is a strange and introspective character, an outsider in that she is a vegetarian and against the hunting of animals. Through numerous brooding digressions, we dive into the mind of a protagonist filled with angst and anger, who at once respects and hates the simple country folk she lives in the middle of, railing against their backwards ways, even as she uses them as a balm for her own life in the city she has long since fled.

Tokarczuk places seemingly random capital letters throughout the book, reminiscent of the style that was popular at the time Blake was writing (Janina and one of the other characters are working on a translation of Blake into Polish throughout most of the story). But it also serves to give an air of autonomy to random elements in the background of the story, (Birds, Murk, Night), suggesting almost that they are characters in their own right, waiting, brooding in the background. And this really, is the great strength of the book. It feels mythic, like a true 21st century fairy tale. The world Tokarczuk has created is dark and ominous and full of shadows, where things lurk just beyond our perception. Drive Your Plow feels like a magical realism novel, although there is no magic involved. It is set very much in our world, but at the same time, there is something off-kilter, as if viewed in a mirror that is ever so slightly warped. This unsettling quality feeds into the sense of not quite belonging, which builds as Janina unravels, and we head to a suitable dark cresendo.

Drive Your Plow is well deserving of the full ★★★★★, and you can expect to see more of Tokarczuk's work in this blog before too long.

Pro tip: save money on Polish flags by 
simply flying your Indonesian flag upside down