Enchanted Forest Murder Mystery

This novel, a literary whodunit, brings a sense of being in an enchanted European forest. Janina, elderly, solitary, and her friend Dizzy, Oddball and Good News, become entangled in a string of murders in and around a small Polish village. All is not as it seems.... ( )

I simply don't know what to say about this oddity. Let me quote the NY Times Book Review: "A marvelously weird and fable-like mystery...a philosophical fairy tale about life and death..." That's good, except maybe for the "marvelous" part. Because there is SO much heavy-handed condemnation of humans who hunt or just eat animals, SO much astrology-gibberish that the intriguing mystery kind of gets short-changed. I admit I didn't see the reveal coming, and I think that may have been in part due to those distracting and detracting elements. Translated from the Polish. ( )

Intriguing, unique, cogently telling is Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead (Title is a quote from William Blake), the 2018 winner of the Nobel prize in literature.
Its slow paced yet strangely compelling plot reminded me a bit of a Grim brothers fairy tale; it has the remote setting, the underlying analogies and a protagonist that is a strange amalgam of calculating, matter fact of coldness persona and sweet, kind old lady. (Indeed, she reminded me on the Brewster sisters of the 1942 Broadway play Arsenic and Old Lace .
However, this master piece of fiction is so much more. The mystery albeit being very satisfying is to me quite secondary. For, primarily, this author’s work aims much higher. There are important questions that are asked. Who is worthy of a voice? Is it really true that the useful, the beautiful, the strong are favored by evolution?
Our protagonist dares to delve into these deep waters where sanity and insanity are one and the same. When she takes drastic action, she knows nothing will ever be the same for her. In the end she must face changed circumstances and she embraces a new life always leaving us wondering, trying to explain to ourselves her course of actions and answer some important philosophical question in time to come. ( )

The writing was simplistic but seemed to fit the voice of the narrator, so I didn't necessarily mind that. As I got further into the book, however, it felt more and more like the novel was being used as a vehicle to push an agenda rather than to tell a story. It just felt too heavy-handed to me. I enjoyed the story itself, but was disappointed in the "holier than thou" moral stance it seemed to take. ( )

Tale of odd happenings and eccentric folk, but the voice of the narrative carries it. Tokarczuk writes in an intriguing, imaginative style that keeps the reader on board. And thus even the harping-on about astrology - normally a complete turn-off - is readable. Hard to summarise what it’s about, or perhaps merely unnecessary, but there are plentiful challenging insights: Tokarczuk, apparently (according to my Polish work colleague), has ended up more or less exiled from Poland due to this nonconformity of thinking (and to the opposite tendency in mainstream Polish culture). ( )