Olga Tokarczuk

Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead

Excerpt

Olga Tokarczuk’s new novel has caused a good deal of consternation among Polish readers, for several reasons. Firstly, she has shocked the public by suddenly turning to popular literature, in other words she has chosen the crime genre. Secondly, she has created a narrator and central character in one person that it is hard to regard purely as a medium through whom the author is demonstrating her own view of the world. Thirdly, she has called her novel a “metaphysical thriller”, implying that this is not just a run-of-the-mill flirtation with commercial fiction.
"Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead" is the story of Janina Duszejko, a retired engineer, who earns extra money as a teacher. She is a great animal lover, and an even greater admirer of the work of William Blake, whose views she tries to apply to a modern mentality. It is the English poet who “answers” for her philosophy of life. Buried up the ears in his ordered world of Great Values, the woman is unable to come to terms with the wobbly morality of the twenty-first century. So she treats the series of peculiar murders that occur in Kotlina Kłodzka, where the action is set, as a punishment deserved by demoralised people. Tracks found at the crime scenes imply that the perpetrators of the murders could be animals, taking revenge for human cruelty. All the victims were involved in hunting.
Naturally, Tokarczuk does not limit herself to building up an intrigue and offering clues designed to help the reader solve the crime puzzle. She sets her thriller in the superbly depicted real world of provincial Poland. She portrays the society that lives there, contrasting typical local bigwigs with a small band of outsiders headed by Duszejko, resulting in lots of comical effects. As events unfold, the comedy gives way to tragedy, linked with the gradual collapse of the heroine’s personality. For all her unconventionality, she is closer to the tradition of the crime novel than she seems at first sight. What is unconventional in this novel is the top quality language and the original – even by world standards – ecological sub-text.

Marta Mizuro
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Olga Tokarczuk (born 1962) is a novelist and essayist, the most popular and most frequently translated Polish female author; her books have now been published in more than twenty languages.