Book Review Olga Tokarczuk Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead

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Spoiler alerts – 2009 – Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones Among an estimated 3,000 book I have read in my life, (going by my lists on Goodreads), I can number very few as being penned by winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is an exception. The title is a quotation from William Blake, as are all the poetry snippets beginning each chapter. The main character, Janina Duszejko is translating his work into Polish (creating some fun for this book’s own translator no doubt). Janina is an old lady with other eccentricities too, including an obsession with astrological birth charts, and animal rights activism. When various men who are hunter,s trappers or just generally cruel to animals get murdered, Janina both helps and hinders the police investigations in a remote village cut off by severe blizzards, and struggles with her own infirmities and failing health too. Overall, this is a rather dull Fargo style murder mystery, told by an unreliable witness, with lots of wild meandering rambling philosophical cutaways. Its ultimate conclusion is no real surprise but it does have some fun along the way with supporting characters given nicknames like Oddball and Big Foot (a man with big feet, not the Sasquatch). Arthur Chappell