Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Starred review from June 3, 2019
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.

June 15, 2019
A series of deaths mystifies a small Polish village. When her neighbor Big Foot turns up dead one night, Janina Duszejko and another neighbor, Oddball, rush to his house to lay out the body and properly dress him. They're having trouble getting hold of the police, and, as Oddball points out, "He'll be stiff as a board before they get here." Janina and Oddball--and Big Foot, up till now--live in an out-of-the-way Polish village on the Czech border. It's rural, and remote, and most of the other inhabitants are part-time city-dwellers who only show up in the summer, when the weather is more temperate. Janina narrates Tokarczuk's (Flights, 2018) latest creation to appear in English. But she wouldn't like to hear herself referred to by that name, which she thinks is "scandalously wrong and unfair." In fact, she explains, "I try my best never to use first names and surnames, but prefer epithets that come to mind of their own accord the first time I see a Person"--hence "Oddball" and "Big Foot." Janina spends much of her time studying astrology and, on Fridays, translating passages of Blake with former pupil Dizzy, who comes to visit. But after Big Foot dies, other bodies start turning up, and Janina and her neighbors are drawn further and further into the mystery of their deaths. Some of the newly dead were involved in illegal activities, but Janina is convinced that "Animals" (she favors a Blakean style of capitalization) are responsible. Tokarczuk's novel is a riot of quirkiness and eccentricity, and the mood of the book, which shifts from droll humor to melancholy to gentle vulnerability, is unclassifiable--and just right. Tokarczuk's mercurial prose seems capable of just about anything. Like the prizewinning Flights, this novel resists the easy conventions of the contemporary work of fiction. In her depictions of her characters and their worlds--both internal and external--Tokarczuk has created something entirely new.

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July 1, 2019
Tokarczuk's captivating novel, following her renowned Flights (2018), opens with narrator Janina Duszejko learning that a neighbor, whom she calls Big Foot, has suddenly died on a cold winter night. An off-season caretaker for homes in a remote Polish village, Janina accompanies her fellow year-round local, known as Oddball, to prepare for the authorities. Big Foot's death, however, isn't a singular event. When others are later found dead, both members of the community and outliers, rumors grow that their demises are the result of strangely nefarious activities. A devoted pupil of astronomy, Janina has few relationships, but they are fierce, and she mounts her own inquiries while navigating the matter-of-fact realities of her physical ailments. As the seasons change, Janina finds herself summarily dismissed by authorities and locals alike, all the while maintaining her beliefs that the perpetrators may not be human at all as the action surges toward a gripping conclusion. Mythical and distinctive, Tokarczuk's translated novel erupts off the page, artfully telling a linear tale while also weaving in the metaphysical, multilayered nuances of Janina's life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

August 2, 2019

Eccentric retired school teacher Janina Duszejko casts horoscopes, defends animal rights, supplements her pension by taking care of neighbors' houses in winter, and emulates William Blake, from whose Marriage of Heaven and Hell the novel's title is derived and whose epigraphs head each chapter. The rural, relatively isolated town in Silesia, Poland, where she lives, is stunned by a series of violent deaths of residents with offbeat monikers (Bigfoot, Oddball), as the townsfolk are led to believe the deaths are caused by wildlife seeking revenge. Janina, � la Miss Marple, enmeshes herself in the hunt for the culprit. Unlike Tokarczuk's earlier Flights, with its philosophical musings and digressions, this work follows a fairly traditional murder-mystery narrative, though it's not entirely lacking social commentary. VERDICT More than an offbeat and dark detective work, this latest from Man Booker Prize-winning and National Book Award finalist Tokarczuk combines ecological and social issues with disturbing images and great characterizations. Fans of this genre will likely be caught off guard when the surprise identity of the murderer is ultimately exposed, as the author lays down very few clues. [See Prepub Alert, 2/11/19.]--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 2, 2019

Tokarczuk, who turned heads with Flights, her genre-bending Man Booker International Prize winner, can be trusted to do something original with the crime novel. In an isolated Polish village, Janina spends the dark winter months ignoring people (she prefers animals) while studying astrology, translating William Blake, and tending to the summer homes of the wealthy. Then a neighbor is found dead.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.