Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
-
-
4.0 • 44 Ratings
-
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
A subversive, entertaining noir novel from the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes place in a remote Polish village, where Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, she becomes involved in the investigation. Duszejko 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.
Filled with wonderful characters like Oddball, Big Foot, Black Coat, Dizzy and Boros, this subversive, entertaining noir novel, by ‘one of Europe's major humanist writers’ (Guardian), offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalised people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination—and getting away with murder.
Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s best and most beloved authors. In 2015 she received the German-Polish International Bridge Prize, as well as Poland's highest literary honour, the Nike and the Nike Readers’ Prize. She also received a Nike in 2009 for her novel Flights, which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.
‘A strongly voiced existential thriller.’ Guardian
'Tokarczuk’s style, combining wit, uncanny metaphor, biological truth and metaphysical profundity, is unique. Her books reveal just how good literature can be.’ Saturday Paper
‘A moral thriller that will keep you guessing until its very last page.’ Culture.pl
‘A magnificent writer.’ Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 2015
‘[Flights is] a guide to living. Every word, observation, reflection and story embraces the importance of staying mobile in thought as much as in being…This is as brilliant and life-affirming as literature gets.’ Saturday Paper, on Flights
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tokarczuk follows her Man Booker International winner Flights with an astounding mystical detective novel. Narrator Janina Duszejko, an English teacher and winter caretaker for a few summer houses in an isolated Polish hamlet near the Czech border, is awakened one night by her neighbor, whom she calls Oddball, who informs her that their neighbor, nicknamed Big Foot, is dead in his house. Before the police arrive, Janina and Oddball find a deer bone in Big Foot's mouth. Soon another body turns up, and Janina, an avid creator of horoscopes and, more generally, prone to theorizing and ascribing incidents to larger systems, develops a theory that animals are killing the locals. As the body count rises, readers are treated to Janina's beliefs ("Finally, transformed into tiny quivering photons, each of our deeds will set off into Outer Space, where the planets will keep watching it like a film until the end of the world"), descriptions (a body is "a troublesome piece of luggage"), and observations (flowers in a garden "are neat and tidy, standing straight and slender, as if they'd been to the gym"). Tokarczuk's novel succeeds as both a suspenseful murder mystery and a powerful and profound meditation on human existence and how a life fits into the world around it. Novels this thrilling don't come along very often.
Customer Reviews
A master class of writing
What is there not to love about this novel? A whodunit of sorts, the shade of William Blake through quotes and references, characters uncompromising in their imperfections and a protagonist who when not speculating on the motivation of animals, casting astrological charts is tipping out of balance the lives (and deaths) around her and getting into the face of officialdom. The setting, of a small remote Polish village not far from a border of a country promising perfection…hah! And winter snow, with the ice dripping of melt. The language and metaphor of the translation is stunning and at times, hilarious. At the end, I was a happy, satiated reader. Yup, the writer certainly drove their plow over my bones.