Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead

Hardcover

Published Dec. 17, 2019 by Rverhead Books.

ISBN:
9780525541332
OCLC Number:
1051777301

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (2 reviews)

With Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Man Booker International Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk returns with a subversive, entertaining noir novel. In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She 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. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, Duszejko becomes involved in the investigation. By no means a conventional crime story, this existential thriller by ‘one of Europe’s major humanist writers’ (Guardian) offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalized people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination – and caused a genuine political uproar in Tokarczuk’s native Poland.

14 editions

Review of 'Sobre os Ossos dos Mortos' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Left any possible spoiler content to the past paragraph. so you can stop before then.

Tokarczuk novel starts off with a loud knock on the door, a visitor, and in a hurried shuffle the discovery of a neighbours body in his home: a local hermit, poacher, and dog abuser whom our protagonist has a distinct dislike of. From there a interesting murder mystery unfolds exploring the relationships between a small community bordering the Czech Republic in Poland and the human and animal relations.

Our protagonist from the begin presents as an unreliable narrator, an elderly vegetarian woman with poor social skills, a strange naming convention for people in her life, an almost fanatical devotion to Astrology, and a passion for William Blakes Poetry which the novel derives its title from. I found myself both sympathetic to her and at odds with her stories, as we see the world through her …