Janina tells us on the first page that she is “already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night”. But a mere whodunit would hardly satisfy a novelist who said “just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time”, and so it is also a primer on the politics of vegetarianism, a dark feminist comedy, an existentialist fable and a paean to William Blake. It is, in effect, a murder mystery: in the bleak Polish midwinter, men in an isolated village are being murdered, and it is left to Janina Duszejko, a kind of eastern European Miss Marple, to identify the murderer. The novel is almost impossible to categorise. When a victim is found with deerprints all around him, it seems entirely feasible that animals are committing murder
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – first published in 2009, and now arriving in a deft and sensitive English translation – provides an extraordinary display of the qualities that have made Tokarczuk so notable a presence in contemporary literature. An outspoken feminist and public intellectual, she has been castigated as a targowiczanin: an ancient term for a traitor. O lga Tokarczuk, whose 2007 novel Flights was awarded the International Man Booker in 2018, is a figure of considerable stature and controversy in her native Poland.
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