Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is Olga Tokarczuk's 2009 novel (English translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones published 2018), one of the structural masterworks in Tokarczuk's catalog and the work that established her broader English-language commercial readership before her 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. The structural premise is Janina Duszejko, a retired English-teaching engineer in her sixties who lives alone in a remote Polish-Czech-border mountain plateau village in the Sudetenland. Janina is an astrologer, a translator of William Blake, and a passionate animal-rights advocate who believes the killing of animals — particularly the recreational hunting that the local Polish-village men engage in — produces specific cosmic-and-moral consequences. When local hunters start turning up dead under suspicious circumstances, Janina becomes simultaneously the investigator pressing the local authorities to take seriously the possibility that animals are killing the hunters in revenge and the broader suspect in the ongoing investigation.

Tokarczuk's structural method is the patient close-first-person Janina narration across the entire arc, with the William Blake-quotation chapter epigraphs providing the structural-philosophical counterpoint to the contemporary Polish-village-mystery procedural. The novel reads in the patient post-modern register Tokarczuk has been refining across the broader catalog (Flights 2007, The Books of Jacob 2014) but with a more conventional mystery-procedural plot architecture than her other major works. The Janina-as-unreliable-narrator structural conceit (Janina's astrological-and-Blakean worldview produces a sustained close-first-person register that the reader must continuously evaluate for its operational reliability) is the structural advantage that lifts the novel above the broader contemporary international literary-mystery tradition. The back-third reveal about the actual mechanism of the hunter deaths delivers the structural emotional payoff the entire novel has been preparing for and recontextualizes the entire narrative.

Recommended as required contemporary Polish-translated literary fiction reading, as the right Tokarczuk entry point for readers coming to her catalog before The Books of Jacob, and for fans of literary mystery generally. The 2017 Agnieszka Holland film adaptation Spoor extended the readership. Compare to W. G. Sebald, Anne Carson, and contemporary European literary-mystery fiction. The Beata Pozniak audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.