... marvelously weird and fablelike ... Tokarczuk is a vocal feminist writer and it’s no accident that the more Duszejko’s sanity is called into question, the more relatable her plight becomes ... Authors with Tokarczuk’s vending machine of phrasing and gimlet eye for human behavior (her tone is reminiscent of Rachel Cusk, with an added penchant for comedy) are rarely also masters of pacing and suspense. But even as Tokarczuk sticks landing after landing, her asides are never desultory or a liability. They are more like little cuts — quick, exacting and purposefully belated in their bleeding. If Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, was built for ambience, Lloyd-Jones’s translation of Drive Your Plow was built for speed ... Only the extended passages on astrology threaten to derail the reader. Lyrical as they are, they could be airlifted out of the novel without causing any structural damage. Tokarczuk successfully aligns these pages with the book’s broader themes, but one can feel that argument being made. Like an insurance policy against skimming ... This book is not a mere whodunit: It’s a philosophical fairy tale about life and death that’s been trying to spill its secrets. Secrets that, if you’ve kept your ear to the ground, you knew in your bones all along.
This mixture of graphic realism...and broad speculation are characteristic of the style of Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most distinctive and original voices in contemporary European literature ... Tokarczuk’s singular achievement is to show how the marginalised, the disregarded, the despised have access to ways of knowing that are outside the perimeters of conventional thinking ... Like her heroine, who sees everything as connected to everything else and every event bound up by a 'complex cosmos of correspondences,' Tokarczuk has a compelling capacity to seek out parallels or juxtapose stories or experiences that constantly draw the reader off trail ... Tokarczuk has every reason too to be grateful for the linguistic friendship of another translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones who has once again done a remarkable job of capturing the uncanny distinction of Tokarczuk’s prose in English. There is much to admire in this book and even more to learn.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead—...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 ... 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 ... Though the book functions perfectly as noir crime – moving towards a denouement that, for sleight of hand and shock, should draw admiration from the most seasoned Christie devotee – its chief preoccupation is with unanswerable questions of free will versus determinism, and with existential unease ... In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, the prose is by turns witty and melancholy, and never slips out of that distinctive narrative voice. It also contains perhaps the most bravura translation performance I have ever seen ... It is an astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise, written by a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility.
Drive Your Plow is a wunderkammer of human and animal struggle and interdependence ... Tokarczuk’s professional background in psychoanalysis is most evident in her character development—while many authors write characters, she writes people who retain their capacity to surprise the reader ... Tokarczuk proves that the novel can absorb philosophy and politics without losing anything of its unique identity, that magical capacity to make a story so compelling that it ascends into the public consciousness ... Once again, Tokarczuk proves herself to be a master of the 'thinking novel,' fashioning what is simultaneously a compelling narrative, measured essay, and fierce manifesto ... both a joy and a call to arms.
These are great mysteries, and Janina Duszejko is a great and fallible soul. Her idiosyncratic, exclamatory style is a pleasure to read, along with her expressive attention to human and non-human suffering ... The climactic scene defamiliarizes the familiar. At a church service celebrating the hunt, the narrator is suddenly sick of the world’s hypocrisy and bursts the bounds of silence. It is a thrilling moment, worthy of the author’s radical and demanding vision.
This is the most special element of the book, the way it balances on the fence between genres—there is suspense that comes from wanting to solve the murders, and then another layer of suspense hovering above that, that comes from wanting to know which type of book it will turn out you have been reading: a crime novel or a fairy tale ... There is another thread at work in the book, a sort of essay hidden inside the novel. The murder mystery resolves one way or another, and the questions about killers and genre will be answered in satisfying ways. But along the way, Tokarczuk plants another seed: She wants to think about the rights of animals, to critique the way they have been erased (by most) from the moral world ... harness[es] the propulsive power of the crime genre to get the reader to think with a different logic. Fiction is a good place to consider this kind of radical paradigm shift—a reader of a novel is already imagining other possible realities. Conjuring an enchanted forest and imagining a world without livestock slaughter are not such different mental projects.
...although the book is a semi-conventional novel, it is an entirely unconventional detective novel, for it features the unlikeliest of amateur sleuths, a bizarre series of crimes and a jaw-dropping denouement ... And what a voice she has ... Tokarczuk keeps the book’s whimsical streak in check with more serious crosscurrents that explore everything from animal rights to predetermination to the way society stigmatizes and marginalizes those it considers mad, strange or simply different. By rights, a whodunit filled with weighty scrutiny and lighthearted comedy shouldn’t get off the ground. But Tokarczuk is capable of miracles and ensures that this extraordinary novel soars.
Translated with virtuosic precision and wit by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Tokarczuk’s prescient, provocative and furiously comic fiction seethes with a Blakean conviction of the cleansing power of rage: the vengeance of the weak when justice is denied ... [an] elegantly subversive novel.
Sometimes the opening sentence of a first-person narrative can so vividly capture the personality of its speaker that you immediately want to spend all the time you can in their company. That’s the case with Mrs. Janina Duszejko, narrator of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead ... In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s beguiling translation, Janina’s passions and pet peeves come through loud and clear ... may don the outward form of a seriocomic murder mystery. But deep down it’s a barbed and subversive tale about what it takes to challenge the complacency of the powers that be.
The novel isn’t memorable for being a perfect noir (though one might say that it could be categorized as such, for its 'ticking all the boxes'), but rather from its ability to turn the genre on its head by broaching much larger existential, political, and psychological issues. Simply by looking at the table of contents, with chapter titles such as 'Testosterone Autism' and 'Cucujus Haematodes,' one realizes that Tokarczuk is a baroque author who, as we later come to discover, is sensitive and attentive to detail ... Tokarczuk is indulgent in her use of idiosyncrasy, comfortable with unattractive characters and eclectic assortments, and takes her time pacing a work that strikes the reader as both niche and approachable at the same time. There is no rashness and, despite the book being a thriller, it is also pensive. The psychological emphasis keeps the tension continuously taut ... Sometimes the trope of the sensitive person in the world of insensitive people comes across as overbearing, though this may be understood as deliberate ... Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation is natural and fluid, though evidently the result of great mechanical work ... the hype is justified. Unexpected and elusive, Tokarczuk is worth reading.
[A] winding, imaginative, genre-defying story ... Part murder mystery, part fairy tale, Drive Your Plow is a thrilling philosophical examination of the ways in which some living creatures are privileged above others. Tokarczuk’s protagonist is delightfully specific ... The novel turns from humorous and outlandish to controlled and commanding as Janina methodically ties the victims’ horoscopes to their brutal deaths ... Though Tokarczuk builds suspense with swift and urgent prose, what captivates most is Janina’s intensity.
Janina's story suffers from a general sense of lassitude in its first third — a result of frustrated expectations brought on by an exaggeratedly-pulpy cover blurb. But Tokarczuk also pulls off some nigh-impossible feats. To get a reader to believe even fictitiously in the power of Janina's astrological readings requires a sense of staunch belief that she is indeed onto something. And in doing so, the story has Janina, and the reader, hitting the limits of capability, of believability, even a real and tangible limit — like a national border ... As far as Drive Your Plow Into the Bones of the Dead is a paean to nature, it works precisely because it works solely through the character of Janina, sidestepping a more sweeping polemic ... Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a sort of ode to Blake ... And in tying Janina with Blake so closely, Tokarczuk manages to link Blake's sharp indictment of human encroachment into nature with Janina's horror at the hunting and killing of animals, and the creep of human corruption into the Polish wilderness ... It may be worth to ask: Does Tokarczuk transcend Blake? Arguable — perhaps. Does she render the limits of human effort more viscerally than Blake? Arguable — perhaps.
...while it adopts the straightforward structure of a murder mystery, its macabre humor and morbid philosophical interludes are distinctive to its author ... Until the excellent payoff at the finale it’s hard to decide whether she’s a kook or a prophet. As for Ms. Tokarczuk, there’s no doubt: She’s a gifted, original writer, and the appearance of her novels in English is a welcome development.
Olga Tokarczuk is a masterful storyteller who challenges expectations of what a story can be ... a thrilling and immersive story ... Tokarczuk's book is, in a large way, about the embodiment of opposing states...hinting at how chaos can destroy that natural fabric, the ecosystem of the world ... Tokarczuk's gentle, light prose plays off against Duszejko's confronting eccentricity. Despite her rigidity, Tokarczuk presents Duszejko's sentimentality and reluctance to conform – to be accepted – as a strength ... Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead might read more like a Slavic fairytale than a thrilling tale of vengeance, but it can be both. It is a warped fable about ecocentrism, a feminist fantasy and a firm critique of those who abuse the power they are given.
... a whodunit that flirts with farce and flits into polemic at times ... Janina’s impassioned and polemical turning of the tables on industrialized farming—'concentration camps,' she calls them—feels overdone, and one wonders at her neglect of the vegan issue (i.e., the imprisonment of female animals to capture their secretions). Then again, this Polish novel cannot be blamed for falling a little flat in the Anglophone context, where the discourse around vegetarianism has shifted away from animal welfare toward concerns about the long-term survival of the planet ... Throughout the novel, nouns are capitalized seemingly at random, an eccentricity that feels needlessly ornamental. There are glib philosophical observations ... Drive Your Plow arrives in the Anglosphere after the dust has settled on other parodic takes on the subject, such as the BBC mockumentary Carnage (2017), which imagined a future where our meat-eating present is configured in the same terms as the Holocaust, with an attendant cast of deniers and atoning enablers. Polemics such as these are funny but also self-undermining. In our cultural context, the vengeful vegetarian has become a tired stock figure ... The novel is, in short, a bit of a drag, but what it lacks in suspense and zeitgeist factor, it makes up for with bleak humor.
Older women make excellent protagonists in murder mysteries ... Tokarczuk’s novels, poems and short stories consistently open up unpredictable wonders and astonishments, and there isn’t a genre that she can’t subvert ... Antonia Lloyd-Jones pulls off a flawless, intimate translation, even tackling the technically dazzling feat of presenting Blake’s poems as translations from English into Polish, back into English ... Seasoned thriller fans may guess who, or what, is behind the murders early on, but the novel is so richly layered that it has a multitude of other satisfactions to offer. Tokarczuk seems to reinvent herself with every book she writes, and between clinical descriptions of corpse-wax, meditations on ageing and the tenuous pleasure of surrogate families, this novel will upturn your expectations ... Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is not as ambitious as The Books of Jacob, or as soaringly inventive as Flights. It will, however, make you want to read everything that Tokarczuk has written.
Beautifully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead...is a riveting whodunit with a black-ice surface of fairy-tale charm and a white-hot core of moral fury ... Drive Your Plow’s scope can feel almost picayune. But the novel’s guise of country farce belies a masterpiece of deeper spiritual conflicts ... Duszejko is an acid wit yet a tender observer, with a predilection for nicknames...and a nearly animistic mode of perceiving nature that lends her narrative a fabular charge. In her spare time, she translates William Blake—the novel takes its title, along with a dash of apocalypticism, from his Proverbs of Hell—and her gift for metaphor is among the novel’s greatest pleasures.
[An] unconventional murder mystery—which many readers will find a more accessible work than Flights ... full of concrete, at times delightful and at other times disturbing, details and images, that ground the book in reality, even though it occasionally verges on the language of myth or fable. It’s also surprisingly funny in spots ... Lloyd-Jones’ translation is skillful and fluid ... energetic talent.
... captivating ... Mythical and distinctive, Tokarczuk’s translated novel erupts off the page, artfully telling a linear tale while also weaving in the metaphysical, multilayered nuances of Janina’s life.
Tokarczuk’s novel is a riot of quirkiness and eccentricity, and the mood of the book, which shifts from droll humor to melancholy to gentle vulnerability, is unclassifiable—and just right. Tokarczuk’s mercurial prose seems capable of just about anything ... In her depictions of her characters and their worlds—both internal and external—Tokarczuk has created something entirely new.
...an astounding mystical detective novel ... Tokarczuk’s novel succeeds as both a suspenseful murder mystery and a powerful and profound meditation on human existence and how a life fits into the world around it. Novels this thrilling don’t come along very often.
