Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk, 2009

 For a time a few years ago, around 2018 or 2019, my family (including the “MV Bicks”) conducted a monthly book club. We took turns each selecting the book, which I recall was the source of a little pressure - my family is well read and intellectual, so there was a pressure to make a good selection, something impressive or respectable which nonetheless was suitably representative of our interests and tastes. For example, I chose Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman. This novel by Olga Tokurczuk was among those selected but I can’t recall by whom. It was after her selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature, since I know my mother bought several copies at Politics and Prose, including the copy I just read - they all advertise the author’s prize on the cover.

I shirked at that time and didn’t read the book, so this year I picked it up again on a whim, more or less. I had little knowledge or context about it and didn’t know what to expect. I was hopeful that reading this novel by an accomplished female author would continue my studies on the subject of women in literature for the benefit of my own writing that I first started with reading The Red Tent. 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Drive Your Plow for short) touches several topics that I also care about, as well as some to which I’m either indifferent or ill disposed. There is an extensive focus on astrology. While I have grown more sympathetic with many spiritual and not strictly scientific ideas during my therapy and recovery from the grief of my parents’ passing, I am not sympathetic to astrology and was somewhat annoyed by it. However, the book is rather funny and full of jokes, including some situational comedy and sardonic, insightful comments and sometimes this included the ironic use of the astrology. Other themes were quite sympatico with my own recent interests, including that of respect for nature, awareness of the passing of seasons, and so on. 

The book is about a slightly older than middle aged woman who lives in a rural small town near the Table Mountains in southwestern Poland. We gradually learn about her background - she once worked as an engineer overseas designing bridges, was once married, once lived in the big city and traveled the world, but now lives in the rural town working ad a caretaker for summer vacation residences in the area and as an English teacher. She is afflicted by strange “Ailments” that appear to be psychosomatic such as incessant weeping which renders her fragile. She spends her free time researching astrology and compiling proof of its veracity and power. Over the course of about a year, there’s a string of mysterious deaths, presumed to be murders, that curse the town. The main character Janina knows all the victims to be hunters and poachers and she comes to believe that the local animals are killing in revenge. The police progressively investigate, and we learn more about Janina’s friendships in town. Janina draws attention to herself by her connections or the victims and her loud insistence that the animals are killing out of justice since the victims are criminals and murderers due to their hunting. She also claims that the deaths are all foretold or described in the astrological signs of the victims. In the end, after a climactic outburst against the village priest during his sermon in honor of the local hunter organization followed by the death of the priest and destruction of the church by arson, Janina admits her guilt to her friends. They help her evade the police, at which point the story ends with her in hiding. 

Drive Your Plow has a rather dreamlike quality to it. I felt some separation to the events and the characters due to the aspects of the incomplete/untrustworthy first person narration by the main character. The most notable element was the character’s disdain for the given names for things, particularly of people. She privately (and sometimes publicly) calls her neighbors and friends by nicknames such as “Odd Ball,” “Big Foot,” or by versions of their legal names, such as “Boros” instead of “Boris” due to the accent of the so-named. Janina hates her own name and mostly goes unnamed. Although the names were evocative and unique, surprisingly I found it somewhat difficult for these to stick in my head and I occasionally was confused. Similarly, many proper nouns were capitalized, which I think was done to convey a sense of importance and respect for things like animals and inanimate objects. The plot is loosely a murder mystery, which is a genre of swirling mystery that is slowly dissipated through drips of information and shocking revelations. This added to the dreamlike quality. It was clever by the author to combine this genre so marked by information obscurity with the focus on astrology, which is likewise focused on trying to glean information from clues. 

There are many recurring insightful comments about life and little offerings of practical philosophy, but aside from the big and obvious lessons that the killing of animals and destruction of nature are serious crimes to which society is willfully and heinously ignorant and accepting, I didn’t feel that the philosophical contents come together meaningfully. It was rather like the author included the smart passing thoughts jotted down in her notes throughout the day - interesting but ephemeral. I wouldn’t categorize the book as an essential source of lessons or insights because of this apparent lack of lasting power, although the general impression was positive after finishing - I think I may benefit in a decentralized emergent manner from the ideas. 

I previously read a couple works by Patrick Modiano, another recent European Nobel writer, who when awarded the prize was lauded for his play with memory and lack theorof. The book I read was about an amnesiac trying to rediscover his life. I guess the prize committee has an interest in this kind of play with information, which I can understand - in my own writing, I realized how challenging it is to present information naturally and smoothly to the reader, balancing between being too blunt and obvious and being confusing or unclear. Therefore, it requires some mastery to be able to be intentionally and artistically unclear in a way that serves the purpose of the writer and the plot. 

There were moments when the main character has to deal with the men around her disregarding her as a “crazy old lady”, and many times when it was clear she was navigating a society and world of systems and bureaucracy staffed by men and made for men, or at least not made for her. The hunters, the villains for Janina, are connected to the police, the government, the church, etc, and their tools like weapons are described as masculine in their symbology. There is a time when the hunters, after discovering the first death, which was a natural death and not a murder by Janina, when they ask or assume that Janina play a particular role in the funerary rites by leading them in song, a role Janina plays despite being somewhat uncomfortable doing so. The hunters tell her it is because she’s a woman after she asks why. I think this is a relatively subtle theme in the book - about navigating the world as a woman. However, this was generally observed without passing judgement.  

The men dealing with the forest and the natural world all claim that the hunting and logging they do are both determined to be man’s role by God and also beneficial for the functioning of the natural world. Janina is much more in favor of eschewing any need for usefulness and instead respecting things for as they are and leaving the natural world be. I’ve become much more aware of the need for greater ecological preservation and the inherent value of the natural world, although I still probably rely on some instrumental arguments for this. Janina also many times is disgusted by the ubiquity of the murdering and torturing of animals, which I somehow have not yet appreciated beyond the intellectual level. I am not a vegetarian and I use leather products, which Janina didn’t like. 

I enjoyed the Eastern European setting, which is somehting I’ve tried to learn about to reconnect with my own family background and after the war in Ukraine drew my attention to the region. I think my previous reading helped me understand or catch the sense of being somehow in between Europe, with its western orientation and a Slavic world oriented eastward. Poland, like Ukraine but more successfully, has drifted more western, but there is still a long and painful history that was mentioned in the book - for example, the whole setting of the book is in the western regions of modern day Poland which were previously politically and culturally German before the end of the Seocnd World War. It was simply in the background of the story, popping up in things like little fairy tales that were mentioned. 

One major feature which I couldn’t interpret was the inclusion of the English poet Blake both as a plot point (one of Janina’s friends aspires to translate Blake professionally, and Janina as an English teacher does it with him as a hobby) and with two line epitaphs before each chapter. I am unfamiliar with Blake in particular and moreover with poetry in general, so I more or less skipped over this, although in doing so I probably did miss out on some of the meanings. 

Overall I greatly enjoyed the book albeit in a somewhat less than deep way. I admit that at times I wasn’t wholeheartedly committed to the book, nor was I engrossingly entertained by it. As such, I do wonder if I’ve left some of its meaning “on the table,” so to speak, and didn’t maximally benefit from it. However, I don’t currently imagine that I will give it a second read, not will I pursue other novels by the author. I finished it and typed this reflection on an airplane without access to the internet, but I may look up reviews of the novel to see if there are significant elements or lessons that I missed in part or in whole.