Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Watch Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Lecture
A subversive, entertaining noir novel from the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes place in a remote Polish village, where Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, she becomes involved in the investigation. Duszejko is reclusive, preferring the company of animals to people; she’s unconventional, believing in the stars, and she is fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken.
Filled with wonderful characters like Oddball, Big Foot, Black Coat, Dizzy and Boros, this subversive, entertaining noir novel, by ‘one of Europe’s major humanist writers’ (Guardian), offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalised people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination—and getting away with murder.
INTERVIEWS and REVIEWS
Atlantic: Summer Reading Guide
AU Review: ‘Darkly funny, politically charged, fiercely feminist, and occasionally just a little bit weird, and it’s a wonderful salute to both Lloyd-Jones’ sensitive translation and Tokarczuk’s outspoken beliefs.’
Big Issue: ‘Entering Mrs. Duszejko’s rich, eccentric world is like waking up in Oz, or falling into Wonderland. Everything, from the unreliable mobile phone signal to the patterns of the wind, is attributed character and motivation, so that the whole universe shimmers with intent, agency and hidden meaning.’
Boston Globe
Economist: ‘Sardonic humour and gothic plot-twists add a layer of macabre rustic comedy. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, an outstanding Polish-English translator, sculpts Janina’s English voice (complete with Blakean capitalisations) with panache.’ ‘An astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise, written by a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility.’
Guardian
Irish Times: ‘Antonia Lloyd-Jones...has once again done a remarkable job of capturing the uncanny distinction of Tokarczuk’s prose in English. There is much to admire in this book and even more to learn.’
The Millions
The Monthly
New Republic
New Statesman: ‘Translated with virtuosic precision and wit by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Tokarczuk’s prescient, provocative and furiously comic fiction seethes with a Blakean conviction of the cleansing power of rage: the vengeance of the weak when justice is denied.’
New York Times
New Yorker: What We’re Reading This Summer
New Yorker: Olga Tokarczuk’s Novels Against Nationalism
PS News
Publishers Weekly
Times ($): ‘Not your typical crime fiction...especially as each chapter carries an epigraph from William Blake.’
Review 31
Tony‘s Reading List
Saturday Paper ($): ‘The extraordinary pleasure of reading this book lies not in finding out “who did it”, but in the defamiliarising prose, characterisation, observation and philosophy that emerge from each page...Tokarczuk’s style, combining wit, uncanny metaphor, biological truth and metaphysical profundity, is unique. Her books reveal just how good literature can be.’
Simon McDonald, Potts Point Bookshop
Spinoff: Papercuts podcast (0:20:50)
Stuff, Books of the Week, December 29, 2018: ‘Skilfully translated by prize winning Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the book illustrates the manipulative, political power of word and phrasing.’
Warren Ellis’s blog: ‘It’s a crime story. It’s also a study in isolation and mental illness. And a masterclass in literary eccentricity...There’s nothing else quite like it.’
andDrive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
‘A magnificent writer.’
‘A strongly voiced existential thriller.’
‘A moral thriller that will keep you guessing until its very last page.’
‘This dazzling writer…feels the heartbeat of the natural world…one of the exhilarations of this novel is working through a complex truth about living among others.’
‘Antonia Lloyd-Jones…has once again done a remarkable job of capturing the uncanny distinction of Tokarczuk’s prose in English. There is much to admire in this book and even more to learn.’
‘Translated with virtuosic precision and wit by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Tokarczuk’s prescient, provocative and furiously comic fiction seethes with a Blakean conviction of the cleansing power of rage: the vengeance of the weak when justice is denied.’
‘Entering Mrs. Duszejko’s rich, eccentric world is like waking up in Oz, or falling into Wonderland. Everything, from the unreliable mobile phone signal to the patterns of the wind, is attributed character and motivation, so that the whole universe shimmers with intent, agency and hidden meaning.’
‘Tokarczuk’s style, combining wit, uncanny metaphor, biological truth and metaphysical profundity, is unique. Her books reveal just how good literature can be.’
‘An astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise, written by a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility.’
‘Sardonic humour and gothic plot-twists add a layer of macabre rustic comedy. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, an outstanding Polish-English translator, sculpts Janina’s English voice (complete with Blakean capitalisations) with panache.’
‘Not your typical crime fiction…especially as each chapter carries an epigraph from William Blake.‘
‘Drive Your Plow casts a mythical spell over a chilly psychological thriller. It is so tantalisingly written, its developments so precisely but invisibly measured out, that I found myself far more likely to forget about the reviewing than the reading…a really good book can change the way we see things…Drive Your Plow unequivocally excels at this.’
‘[Flights is] a guide to living. Every word, observation, reflection and story embraces the importance of staying mobile in thought as much as in being…This is as brilliant and life-affirming as literature gets.’
‘A barbed, shrewd parodic eco-noir.’
‘Provocative and darkly comic fiction.’
‘It’s a crime story. It’s also a study in isolation and mental illness. And a masterclass in literary eccentricity…There’s nothing else quite like it.’
‘…darkly funny, politically charged, fiercely feminist, and occasionally just a little bit weird, and it’s a wonderful salute to both Lloyd-Jones’ sensitive translation and Tokarczuk’s outspoken beliefs.’
‘Skilfully translated by prize winning Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the book illustrates the manipulative, political power of word and phrasing.’
‘Olga Tokarczuk is a masterful storyteller who challenges expectations of what a story can be.’
‘[A] mordant mix of whodunit, astrology, and the poetry of William Blake.’
‘Ridiculous and existentially challenging by turns, this is a wildly inventive book.’
‘This book is a wild ride, full of harsh judgments and sharp-tongued language, until the surprise end.’
‘Drive Your Plow is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it’s one of the most existentially refreshing novels I’ve read in a long time.’
‘A noir murder mystery that is less whodunnit than it is existential inquiry…Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation from Polish sparkles.‘
‘A barbed and subversive tale about what it takes to challenge the complacency of the powers that be.’
‘[A] marvelously weird and fablelike mystery…This book is not a mere whodunit: It’s a philosophical fairy tale about life and death that’s been trying to spill its secrets.‘
‘It is a murder mystery, and therefore it rattles along, but it’s also a philosophical contemplation on man’s relationship with the natural world, and our relationships to those that we deem to be marginal—at the edge of society—and how we react to them…It’s a fantastically rich book.’
‘A blend of fairy tale and murder mystery, Tokarczuk explores how we assign privilege and sanity to some over others as her astrology-obsessed, animal-loving protagonist demands to be heard.’
‘I thrilled to this story—a dark, strange, comic, twisted masterpiece…It’s a great narrative voice, and I loved the book from the first page.’
‘Brilliant, black-comic, eccentric writing. A novelist I only recently discovered, who is fully worthy of her Nobel Prize.‘
‘Tokarczuk raises essential questions about whose voices are privileged above others.’
‘A genre-defying novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is part investigative thriller and part fairytale, with biting social critique and a wicked sense of humor.’
‘Wonderfully weird…Despite its highbrow laurels, Tokarczuk’s novel reads more like a Slavic episode of Murder, She Wrote than a literary homework assignment.’
‘A dark and fun mystery, a feminist comedy, plus a primer on existentialism and animal rights. It’s the mix of high and low, humor and darkness that makes Tokarczuk such a remarkable chronicler of range of human emotions.’
‘Crackling with energy and wholly original, Olga Tokarczuk dazzles with this literary thriller that is both ecofeminist manifesto and page-turning whodunit…This book is fierce and essential, fundamentally challenging how we perceive the world.’
‘Haunting and beautifully written.’
‘[A] wonderful Polish thriller and dark feminist comedy.’
‘Tocarczuk is one of the greats. Drive Your Plow has one of the strangest narrators in literature, a kooky solitary with a Blake and astronomy obsession. Like Herzog, she sends long letters to people. Another genre defying masterpiece.’
‘While it adopts the straightforward structure of a murder mystery, [the book features] macabre humor and morbid philosophical interludes [that] are distinctive to its author… [and an] excellent payoff at the finale… . As for Ms. Tokarczuk, there’s no doubt: She’s a gifted, original writer, and the appearance of her novels in English is a welcome development.’
‘A paean to nature… a sort of ode to Blake… [and] a lament… Does Tokarczuk transcend Blake? Arguable —perhaps.’
‘A brilliant literary murder mystery.’
‘Shimmering with subversive brilliance … . this is not your conventional crime story—for Tokarczuk is not your conventional writer. Through her extraordinary talent and intellect, and her ‘thinking novels,’ she ponders and tackles larger ecological and political issues. The stakes are always high; Tokarczuk repeatedly rises to the occasion and raises a call to arms.’
‘Sometimes the opening sentence of a first-person narrative can so vividly capture the personality of its speaker that you immediately want to spend all the time you can in their company. That’s the case with … Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead … [a] barbed and subversive tale about what it takes to challenge the complacency of the powers that be.’
