Saturday, October 24, 2020

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead *** 1/2

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a murder mystery that takes place in a remote Polish hamlet near the Czech border. Our narrator Janina is one of the few year-round residents of the Plateau, and the story starts with the death of her neighbor Big Foot. He choked on a bone from a deer that he had poached, and Janina believes that the deer murdered him. When a few more local hunters turn up dead, she promotes the idea that the animals are seeking retribution.

The author is a Nobel laureate, so you know the book has more on its mind than just a whodunit. Janina is a philosophical woman whose aptitude in astrology reflects her interest in the workings of fate and a world out of balance. She is an advocate for the animals who may be granting humans their comeuppance.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is nowhere near as interesting as Flights, but it has a definite atmosphere and its philosophical concerns emerge naturally from the story.

But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.

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