First published in Polish in 2009 and newly translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a literary murder mystery set in a small Polish village. The novel opens with the death of a man in a remote forest area. Two neighbours go to investigate lights left on in the home and discover the man dead. They move the body, dress the man in a suit, and call it into the police. To do the latter, they have to climb a hill in order to get enough reception to call the Polish police vs. the Czechoslovakia authorities. .
Our protagonist Mrs. Duszejko is one of the neighbours. She teaches English at the village school and is an astrologer. She has nicknames for many members of the community: Oddball (the other neighbour), Big Foot (the dead neighbour), Dizzy (her friend with whom she translates Blake’s poetry), Good News (thrift shop woman), and Black Coat (Oddball’s son, who is also the police inspector).
Mrs. Duszejko is quite the character. She is convinced that the forest animals are seeking revenge on hunters in the area. As more men end up dead, her horoscopes and theories are presented repeatedly to the police who write her off as a crazy old crank. But there might be something to her madness.
Author Olga Tokarczuk is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and her novel Flights won the Man Booker International Prize. In Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, she pushes the reader to reflect on philosophical questions about human nature, our assumed superiority over animals, and the role we have in tending to the land. There is a quiet, unwinding to this tale.
I discovered this book at Upstart & Crow so I highly recommend you get your copy from them. The novel is published in Canada by Penguin Random House.