Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk
[Fitzcarraldo Editions]
In keeping with Flights, which earned her the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is eccentric both in the technical sense of ‘lacking a central axis’, and in the more common sense of being ‘unconventional or slightly strange.’ Unafraid to splay off in digression, her writing, at least formally, owes much to the philosophically-inflected works of Milan Kundera – the lodestar of a constellation of writers from Central Europe who attempted, and who did not always succeed, in combining quirkiness with profundity.
Janina Duszejko, the novel’s narrator, is a solitary, and oddly lovable, crank: an amateur of astrology, a perceptive ruminator, and philozoic to the core, she at times resembles, with her many oddities, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. Like Beckett’s vagrant, Janina muses and ruminates, offering us her idiosyncratic thoughts and observations on her inhospitable enclave, ‘the Plateau.’ These are endearingly intuitive and organic – the reactions, however seemingly asocial, of an isolated figure responding to an inhuman world, unconventional but not without their kernels of truth.
Tokarczuk’s narrative unfolds around the disappearance of her two dogs – ‘her girls’ – and the mysterious deaths of members of a local hunting club, murders for which Janina blames the local deer, creatures whom she relentlessly humanises. Janina’s anthropomorphising, however, goes radically beyond any paternalistic, and altogether benign, attribution of identity to animals; instead she views them as agents, capable of taking revenge. Her position is one of radical equality, epitomised when, censured by the police for ‘having more compassion for animals than for people’, she retorts: ‘that’s not true. I feel just as sorry for both.’
Tokarczuk herself has been accused in Polish media of promoting ‘eco-terrorism’ and ‘anti-Christian’ messages. With nationalism in Poland renascent, such attempts at domestic marginalisation are sadly predictable. Yet the political aspects of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead are only ever oblique, a tendency which is hardly surprising in Central and Eastern European writers to whom overtly political writing is understandably anathema.
In any case, far from being evidence of prevarication, this subtlety is often as subversively oppositional as more conventional polemic, an approach which she has largely chosen to eschew. As Tokarczuk has said in interviews, her formal radicalism is itself political, her nation having been deprived the stable loam from which realism, with all its rigid linearity, grew.
This isn’t to say, though, that the political is simply dissolved and redeployed as formal pyrotechnics; indeed, Janina’s declaration, ‘I love crossing borders’, reads as a kind of précis for the more explicitly essayistic Flights, containing in embryo its thematic preoccupation with, and critique of, the obligations to belong and to be rooted.
Finally, Tokarczuk’s prose, which has been justly commended for its lucidity, as well as her penchant for metaphorical originality – flowers stand ‘straight and slender, as if they’d been to the gym’ – is most brilliantly rendered by her translator and friend, Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Words: Luke Warde
