Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel Hardcover – August 13, 2019

This is a highly entertaining read, a tale of “frontier justice” not to be missed! The first person narrator is a quirky, ironic, and remarkably lovable character owing to her courage, candor, and commitment to her ideals. The juxtaposition of dear friends and mortal enemies creates a tension both arresting and humorous. Add Olga Tokarczuk to a long list of Nobel Prize winners familiar with the works of Emanuel Swedenborg!

This story is presented as a murder mystery, though it turns out to be one with a fairly predictable solution, which you will find yourself sensing about halfway through the book. What makes this murder mystery unique is how the musings of the main character Janina—a misanthropic, animal-loving, middle-aged hippie living alone in rural Poland—tend toward the humorous, poetic, mythical, and philosophical. I sense in the book the influence of Bruno Schulz, another famed Polish author. The problem is that those musings can also tend to be rather annoying when the author wants us to find them funnier than they really are.It’s not often we encounter smart, strong, interesting, and independent protagonists who happen to be single older women. Those I like. But I’ve known many people who behave very specifically like Janina, and I’ve never liked any of them: impractical, self-sabotaging, overly dramatic baby boomer hippie women who believe in new age things and who make their illnesses aspects of their personality. Maybe the author is making the point that we, the readers, don’t have to like or agree with the protagonist. But it seems that the author herself does, at least a little, and wants us to see the justifications behind Janina’s actions. This I find increasingly difficult to do as the story progresses, and especially after Janina is revealed to be an extremely unreliable narrator. By that time, I’ve already figured out the mystery for myself anyway (or have stopped caring which of the four or five main characters could be the culprit), and what I do come to understand is how Janina’s predicament is actually caused by her lifelong string of poor life decisions, lack of social skills, and bouts of irrational thinking enabled by well-meaning associates.I think the story would be improved if the ending weren’t so pat, neat, and clean (or at least so guessable.) It would be more interesting if there were no solution at all, or if one were revealed that was pointless, inexplicable, maybe even involving some magical realism. Because the mystery isn’t even the point here. The main attraction is really the author’s descriptions of Janina’s secluded, dismal, woodsy life near a small town run by corrupt, sexist, game-shooting locals, how she got there, and her idiosyncratic inner monologues, all which I found fascinating enough as a realist slice-of-life story. The author wants us to read the story as eccentric and philosophical, when in reality the story is a more serious portrait of mental illness left undiagnosed and untreated, debilitating the life of a person who is otherwise educated and accomplished. In this I find more tragedy than humorous, philosophical depth.

This book might be categorized as a "mystery," because there are murders which are solved at the end. But what draws the reader in is the twisted mind of the narrator -- a recluse who believes in astrology and loves animals and does good things for strange reasons. In fact, it wasn't until the very end that I realized that it was a mystery.Each chapter begins with a quote from William Blake, and the title is a quote from his "Proverbs of Hell":"In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. The cut worm forgives the plow. Dip him in the river who loves water. A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star. Eternity is in love with the productions of time."Like Blake, this author is both enigmatic and insightful.Passages that caught my eye:"It is in the feet that all knowledge of Mankind lies hidden; the body sends them a weighty sense of who we really are and how we relate to the earth." p. 10"I believe each of us sees the other Person in our own way, so we should give them the name we consider suitable and fitting. Thus, we are polyonymous." p. 19"I have never believed in any personalized distribution of eternal Light." p. 39"As I gazed at the black-and-white landscape of the Plateau, I realized that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. it lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence." p. 47"Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There's no instruction manual." p. 83"Sometimes I think that only the sick are truly healthy." p. 84"There's nothing natural about nature anymore...It's too late. The natural processes have gone wrong, and now we must keep it all in control to make sure there's no catastrophe." p. 195"... sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other." p. 224"... my belief that the human psyche evolved n order to defend us 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." p. 225"The fact that we don't know hat's going to happen in the future is a terrible mistake in the programming of the world. It should be fixed at the first opportunity." p. 271