Charmingly bizarre. This is the sort of book that appeals to only a certain type of reader and anyone else will hate it. ( )

59. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
translation: from Polish by [[Antonia Lloyd-Jones]] (2018)
OPD: 2009
format: 274-page hardcover
acquired: 2020 read: Oct 16 – Nov 3 time reading: 8:44, 1.9 mpp
rating: 4½
genre/style: contemporary Fiction theme: TBR
locations: contemporary rural Poland
about the author: “A Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual”, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018. Born in western Poland in 1962.

A curious fun book. Astrology, vegetarianism, hunting and murder (or is it revenge?). Logic is really not the main thing on the surface here. We follow Mrs. Duszejko's narrative, and she thinks about what the star charts say about when we will die, and the inheritance of acquired experience, and about all those innocent hunted critters in a hunting community. She also tears people down in narrative, privately to us, while kindly serving them comforting warm tea on a winter day. Anger is a theme.

We're in rural Poland, a short diving distance outside a small town where hunting is part of the culture and economy. In the rural area there are about 8 homes, and three residents who stay through the bitter winters, including Mrs. Duszejko, who doesn't like her first name or any names given at birth. She calls people by whatever feature about them strikes her. In the opening, Oddball tells her Bigfoot has died alone in his home, and so on.

Olga Tokarczuk is listed on Wikipedia as an activist, although I don't know anything about what that exactly means for her. But usually in implies some effort to against the grain. Independent minded Mrs. Duszejko goes hard against the grain, connecting to society really only through teaching school children English, and helping a friend translate William Blake into Polish. The book's title is from a William Blake poem, Proverbs of Hell, (It's paraphrased. The poem is a list of about 80 strange and unconnected proverbs. See here: https://poets.org/poem/proverbs-hell ), and each chapter is headed with a line from that poem. There are a lot of games with Blake working through the text (and I certainly didn't pick up on most of them.)

Despite the fun, it's also an uneven pace, sometimes grounding to a very slow pace. It rewards most in completing, leaving us to wonder what to make of Mrs. Duszejko. She is, perhaps, a modern-day witch. And I assume that says something about our cultural crimes today, and those who try to speak out about them.

Overall this wintery book of dead men leaves us in warm place, smiling a little, and noting a whole lot going on. Not sure where this sits in terms of her Nobel Prize, but I'm happy to have read it, and hope to read more by her.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/354226#8281309 ( )

I read this for my book club and loved it—being now firmly in the older, cranky, animal-company-seeking lady demographic that, I'm discovering, has some wonderful representation in fiction. I've already bought a copy of this as a Christmas gift for a fellow cranky old animal loving friend, and recommended it to another (who will have much more love for the astrology component, which is not my thing in the least but I appreciated as an example of any method that we get attached to to help make sense of the world). ( )

This is a strange and wonderful book, a combination murder mystery, fairy tale, political polemic, and character study. That's a lot to cram into one column, and it took me quite a while to get deeply involved. The central character is an old Polish woman who cares at least as deeply for animals as for people, and who is a committed astrologer, convinced that the stars determine our lives and characters. She has friends (an odd group) but she also has enemies. As the novel progresses, it turns out to be operating on several levels, asking profound questions as well as the ones on the surface. When I first started listening, I didn't know if I would finish. By the time I had finished, I had ordered a physical book: I want to reread it, and there are many passages I want to highlight. ( )

I think it maybe lacked something to make it truly great to me but I really enjoyed it. It definitely grew on me more and more over the course of reading. The major stuff that happens is often downplayed so it becomes more about living the life of the narrator - growing into how the hamlet and the forest feels, the isolation of rural Poland, the constant aches and pains of age. The mindset and understanding of the narrator is really developed and fascinating to see both when she's extremely sympathetic and when she's not so much. I'm not exactly an astrology supporter in any way but I definitely came away more sympathetic to it.

I think the slow build of the major events works well too - at the start I was sort of looking for something to Happen to cling on to but I felt it being downplayed made the ending better. ( )