Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

If I hadn’t known her so well, I’m sure I would have read her books. But as I did know her, I was afraid to open them. What if I found myself described in them in a way that I couldn’t fathom? Or my favorite places, which for her are something completely different from what they are to me? In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind—that such

a Person is not him- or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality—its inexpressibility.

“One has to tell people what to think. There’s no alternative. Otherwise someone else will do it.”