Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones was our book club book for the month. Unfortunately, I won't be able to go to book club because I'll be traveling, but I did read the book because I am the type of person who always does her homework. 

From the first line of the book, I was drawn in.

I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night. (page 1)

Janina lives in a remote Polish village near the border of the Czech Republic. People start dying around her in suspicious ways and her reputation as a bit of an oddity make people start looking at her as the main suspect. 

I have two main points to make about this book and since I didn't get to talk about it at book club, I'm going to just rant on here. 

One, the main character and I are basically the same person. We think a lot alike and I'm just about twenty years younger. In twenty years, I will be Janina. Two, this is one of those endings that another reader might have figured out earlier on, but absolutely surprised me. That surprise made me really enjoy the rest of the book.  

I definitely would not have read this book without the prodding of my book club, but I'm glad I read it. 

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

What a joy it is in life when you happen to have a clean, warm kitchen. It has never happened to me. I have never been good at keeping order around me. Too bad - I'm reconciled to it by now. (page 17-18)

LOLOLOLOL for days.

....I liked to imagine how it would all look millions of years from now. Would the same plants be here And what about the color of the sky? Would it be just the same? Would the tectonic plates have shifted and caused a range of high mountains to pile up here? Or would a sea arise, removing all reason to use the word "place" amid the idle motion of the waves? (page 54)

I tend to imagine what a place looked like before humans came around. Imagine the prairies of Wisconsin before European settlers came? The birds singing so much that it seems like a wall of sound? Prairie grasses taller than humans. A nighttime sky so clear you can see the Milky Way. But I definitely can appreciate the thought of what a location will look like in the future, too. 

The angels, if they really do exist, must be splitting their sides laughing at us. Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There's no instruction manual. (page 83)

I have maintained that an instruction manual given to us at birth would have been a good idea!

"Its Animals show the truth about a country," I said. "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." (page 101)

Treatment of animals is an interesting proxy variable for a lot of things in discussions about the "success" of a country. 

...I tried to slow down my thoughts, but they must have broken the speed limit by now, and were racing in my head, somehow managing to pervade my body and bloodstream as well. (page 104)

See what I mean about Janina being me? I sometimes imagine what it must be like to have a brain that isn't constantly spiraling with thoughts. 

On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it's plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure. (page 115-116)

I feel this is my very soul.

I also went to the expense of buying some Cambozola, to cheer myself up if only with a bit of cheese. (page 122)

Janina = me.

I'd love to know how a Bat sees the world; just once I'd like to fly across the Plateau in its body. (page 139)

YES!!! I'd like to be a bat, an owl, and a human man for just a few minutes. I just want to know what it's like. 

For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist, the villages where they went on holiday, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafes, and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it's all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it anymore. (page 162-163)

I'm going back to my hometown this weekend and I know it's going to be painful.

I had my Theory about interjections of this kind; every single Person has their own expressions which he or see overuses. Or uses incorrectly. These words or phrases are the key to their intellect. Mr. "Apparently," Mr. "Generally," Mrs. "Probably," Mr. "Fucking," Mrs. "Don't You Think?," Mr.  "As If." The President was Mr. "In Truth."

....

I couldn't help thinking that someone who overuses the phrase "in truth" is sure to be a liar. (page 185-186)

Janina's observations never failed to crack me up.

Things I looked up:

pyknic (page 26) - relating to or denoting a stocky physique with a rounded body and head, thickset trunk, and a tendency to be fat

mouflon (page 83) - wild sheep

leveret (page 83) - a young hare in its first year

fieldfare (page 98) - a bird in the thrush family

Canaletto (page 146) - Eighteenth century Italian painter of city views of Venice, Rome, and London

chiaroscuro (page 146) - the treatment of light and shade in drawing and painting

tenebrism (page 146) - a style of painting developed by Caravaggio and other 17th-century Spanish and Italian artists, characterized by predominantly dark tones and shadows with dramatically contrasting effects of light

cockchafer (page 210) - a large brown European beetle that flies at dusk and often crashes into lighted windows; the adults are damaging to foliage and flowers and the larvae are a pest to cereal and grass roots

All of this is an indication that I should have taken some classes in art history and should have more knowledge of plant and animal life. I have some regrets about my course selection in college, friends.