The winter starts straight after All Saints' Day. That's the way here; the autumn takes away all her Tools and toys, shakes off the leaves – they won't be needed anymore – sweeps them under the field boundary, and strips the colors from the grass until it goes dull and gray. Then everything becomes black against white: snow falls on the plowed fields. “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead,” I said to myself in the words of Blake; is that how it went? I stood in the window and watched nature's high-speed housework until dusk fell, and from then on the march of winter proceeded in darkness.
Reading others' reviews for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead mostly taught me that I wasn't prepared with the requisite knowledge to fully appreciate what Olga Tokarczuk was going for here: I know nothing of William Blake beyond tygers burning bright; I know nothing of the Catholic Church-backed macho hunting community in Poland; I've never read the Polish lady detective novels from the 1990s that this book is apparently satarising. As someone who could only approach this story head on, recognising nothing deep in the plot nor elevated in the writing, this was a middling experience for me: some interesting philosophical bits, but in service to nothing I could connect with. [Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.]
Its Animals show the truth about a country. Its attitude toward Animals. If people behave brutally toward Animals, no form of democracy is ever going to help them, in fact nothing will at all.Janina (but don't call her that) Duszejko is an aging hippie; a semi-retired ex-engineer who now teaches English part-time to school children and who spends most of her year prowling the woods in her rural community of southern Poland, checking up on empty summer homes while their residents are away. She is deeply into creating and studying Horoscopes, spends pleasant evenings with a friend translating Blake into Polish, and is always on alert for poachers; collecting evidence, making official complaints, and generally finding herself dismissed as a crank and a madwoman. When some locals begin turning up dead in suspicious circumstances (could the Russian mafia be involved?), Mrs. Duszejko herself comes up with the most compelling of explanations: perhaps the Animals have become murderous, taking their revenge against interlopers in their woods. Needless to say, this theory does not improve the old woman's standing in the community. Taken at face value (as I must), the plot is interesting, not fascinating, but I did enjoy the nature writing and found all of the characters to be very well fleshed out. (The translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who rendered this into English must be acknowledged, too: at one point, Duszejko and her friend Dizzy are debating how best to translate a stanza from Blake into English, and four options are given, which the reader realises must have been translated from the English and written and rewritten in Polish by Tokarczuk, and then translated back into English, preserving the changing rhymes and the subtly different nuances of meaning of each version, as the characters discuss them. Seeing how all four versions are, in fact, true to the meaning of the original really demonstrates the demanding art behind faithful translation.)
The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system – it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.There are different views on the nature of reality in this book – whether fixed by the stars in Duszejko's horoscopes, decreed by God in one of Father Rustle's sermons, or manipulated by a writer like the Gray Lady in her horror fiction (who necessarily, in the process, “strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility”) – but I couldn't tell if the “meat is murder” theme (which we are all blinded to in our daily lives, as in this last quote) was actually the point of this book, or if Duszejko's veganism and animal rights crusades were meant to demonstrate how out-of-step she was with a rural community that embraces hunting (and poaching and fur farming) as a traditional way of life. Obviously, Olga Tokarczuk is an Important and Celebrated author (although others' reviews have shied me off from reading her Man Booker International-winning Flights), and I will accept any suggestion that to not recognise genius here is my own failing, but I feel the need to weasel out with a noncommittal three stars.
