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A review by chrisbiss
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
4.5
One of my goals this year is for 50% of the fiction I read to be in translation, and I'm kicking off my attempt to meet that goal with Antonia Lloyd-Jones' translation of Olga Tokarczuk's novel *Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead*, published in Polish in 2009 but not translated into English until 2018.
Over the past year or so I've really got into crime fiction, and I've been seeking out 'literary crime' with mixed results. Literary fiction often thrives in ambiguity, and I love that - except when it comes to crime, which is a genre that (mostly) demands closure and a satisfying denouement. Many of the litcrime novels I've read leave things hanging in a way that I've found deeply frustrating when what I really want is for plot to unravel itself around me. Thankfully Tokarczuk manages to balance the best of both genres here, and I really enjoyed this.
My biggest surprise with *Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead* was in how funny it is. When I see the words "Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature" on the cover I don't particularly anticipate humour, and that expectation is compounded by having read this in the Fitzcarraldo Editions version. Those books are very, very pretty, but their austere, sparse presentation very much implies that this is a Serious Novel, and the books I've read from their catalogue have reinforced that for me. *Drive Your Plow...* **is** a Serious Novel, one that explores ideas about disability, age, religion, and conservatism, but it's also a novel that's at times laugh-out-loud funny.
Mrs. Duszejko is a force of personality and her narration grips hold of us immediately, not just thrusting us into her world but forcing us to see it exactly as she sees it. "Curtain-twitching old woman solves crimes" is of course a staple of the genre, and at times this is the coziest of cozy crime novels - especially if you read it on a day when you can't leave the house due to heavy snow mirroring the weather of the book, as I did. But it's also much more than that, straying into and teasing magic realism, delivering a treatise on the ethics of vegetarianism, and very delicately and sensitively portraying what it means to live with chronic illness. Tokarczuk is on record as having said that "just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time", and that attitude is on every page of this book.
The reveal, when it comes, isn't entirely unexpected. I'd begun to put the clues together and had my suspicions about who the killer might be, but because of all the other layers in the narrative it wasn't one of those moments where I then felt a burning urge to get to the end to find out if I was right. Having my suspicions confirmed didn't give me the "Aha! I've solved it!" moment I often seek from crime, but that's because it's so good in every other way that the way it interacts with the tropes of its genre is just icing on the cake.
Highly recommended.
Over the past year or so I've really got into crime fiction, and I've been seeking out 'literary crime' with mixed results. Literary fiction often thrives in ambiguity, and I love that - except when it comes to crime, which is a genre that (mostly) demands closure and a satisfying denouement. Many of the litcrime novels I've read leave things hanging in a way that I've found deeply frustrating when what I really want is for plot to unravel itself around me. Thankfully Tokarczuk manages to balance the best of both genres here, and I really enjoyed this.
My biggest surprise with *Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead* was in how funny it is. When I see the words "Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature" on the cover I don't particularly anticipate humour, and that expectation is compounded by having read this in the Fitzcarraldo Editions version. Those books are very, very pretty, but their austere, sparse presentation very much implies that this is a Serious Novel, and the books I've read from their catalogue have reinforced that for me. *Drive Your Plow...* **is** a Serious Novel, one that explores ideas about disability, age, religion, and conservatism, but it's also a novel that's at times laugh-out-loud funny.
Mrs. Duszejko is a force of personality and her narration grips hold of us immediately, not just thrusting us into her world but forcing us to see it exactly as she sees it. "Curtain-twitching old woman solves crimes" is of course a staple of the genre, and at times this is the coziest of cozy crime novels - especially if you read it on a day when you can't leave the house due to heavy snow mirroring the weather of the book, as I did. But it's also much more than that, straying into and teasing magic realism, delivering a treatise on the ethics of vegetarianism, and very delicately and sensitively portraying what it means to live with chronic illness. Tokarczuk is on record as having said that "just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time", and that attitude is on every page of this book.
The reveal, when it comes, isn't entirely unexpected. I'd begun to put the clues together and had my suspicions about who the killer might be, but because of all the other layers in the narrative it wasn't one of those moments where I then felt a burning urge to get to the end to find out if I was right. Having my suspicions confirmed didn't give me the "Aha! I've solved it!" moment I often seek from crime, but that's because it's so good in every other way that the way it interacts with the tropes of its genre is just icing on the cake.
Highly recommended.