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Olga Tokarczuk
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Discussion: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Not going to get this started until after Thursday this week, but I fully committed to reading this.
I read this a while ago and look forward to the discussion.
Carol, I read this a while back, and I liked it. It was very different. I did not figure out the twist at the end. I look forward to the discussion.
I’m another who read this some time ago. Gave it 5 stars. Not sure I remember it well enough now to contribute much to the discussion, though,
Just started…I love this sentence: “I am 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.”First of all, it reminds me of my mother who insisted we not leave the house without clean underwear because you never knew when you might be in an accident. Second, it gives me a lot of insight into the character of the narrator in one sentence! She is an older woman and perhaps not all that happy about it. She is orderly and probably values that in other people. She wants to make a good impression on people as someone who may be old but still cares for herself. She probably has a clear - and perhaps inflexible - opinion of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, which may express itself in a judgmental attitude. So I’ll keep reading and see if my first impression is correct.
I’m reading this now, about 3/4 through and enjoying it. I like our crusty narrator who despises her name but it’s easier for me to call her Janina than to look up her last name. (I only hope I got the first name right)I have found myself highlighting frequently as I am enjoying Janina’s comments on everything. I’m also curious how this is going to end, though the mystery seems secondary to the characters to me.
I did check out some GR reviews before I started reading to capture a flavor of the book, ones of varying ratings. I’m struck by those that stated that there was an over abundance of writing on the topic of astrology in the novel. I don’t find that to be true at all.
I thought she wrote quite a bit about astrology and how the stars predict world events and events in peoples lives. Do I believe it, the vote is still out. I don’t think the author has high regards for the people of Czechoslovakia. Sue what did you think about the Blake angle. It seemed to be a major role in the book.
I read this two years ago and loved it. Janina is a wonderful character with many admirable qualities. I loved the way she imbues nature with an ethic and generosity of spirit she finds sadly lacking in humans. She never hesitates to help a neighbor in need. Her quirky, crazy narrative voice is delightful. Janina is funny in spite of her craziness—or, perhaps, because of it.
In many ways, she reminds me of another crazy, quirky, eccentric, and equally lovable elderly woman, Baba Djuna in Alina Bronsky's Baba Dunja's Last Love.
I have a soft spot for well-written novels featuring elderly women :)
I'm a little over halfway through, the more I read, the more I like Janina. In the book, she's younger than I am.
I didn't rate this one very highly, perhaps because of the lengthy bits that treated the pseudoscience of astrology seriously. Here is my Goodreads review: The general idea is interesting, and I also feel despair about the way human society treats animals and wildlife, but the attempt to put forth astrology as a serious endeavor lost me, and though I like quirky characters, the main character was almost too quirky, yet we are somehow also supposed to believe that she was a competent professional. I also wonder if this book lost something in translation to English or not. I did enjoy the descriptions of nature.
I’m about 1/3 of the way through this book. So far I have not found the astrology objectionable. In fact, I think it fits with the personality traits I surmised in the first chapter because it gives her a sense of order, patterns, and a level of predictability or certainty about the future.
I finished the book yesterday while on a reading binge. (Aren't Sundays wonderful?) I felt the astrology added to Janina's quirkyness. I felt sorry for her when she found out what happened to her "Little Girls." I also loved her compassion for nature and animals. Besides the fact she was a murderer, I really liked her and got a chuckle out of Oddball stating he would marry her when she got out of jail, and the son, Black Coat, one of the policemen, asking, "Have you totally lost your marbles out here in the wilds, Dad?" Thanks for nominating it.
I found this book quite intriguing, and the main character quite appealing. The descriptions were engaging, and I felt like I got a real taste for the countryside and the village ways. I wasn't distracted by the astrology and appreciated the themes about the lack of respect for the aged, and the brutality against animals. I'm not that knowledgeable about history or Geography, and probably missed a lot of references, but I felt like it was a metaphor for a greater message about political oppression and disregard for human life. It reminded me of The Vegetarian by Han Kang. I'm not sure I would have picked up this title if it wasn't part of this list, but glad I read it.
I’m a bit surprised but I actually liked this book a lot. The narrator character was so perfectly drawn, consistent and complex from the first sentence to the last. The plot is odd but in the context of the book as a whole, it actually makes sense…just keep reading and suspend your skepticism.
“Tokarczuk is fundamentally a portraitist, a writer with a keen sense for sniffing out the incongruities that make a person — on display in her much-lauded novel, Flights, and here. Should she happen upon a whodunit, great!”Tonight I found this review…interesting
NPR Review: 'Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead' : NPR
Wow Mary. From that NPR site, I found out there was a movie called SPOOR from this book. It was rated in the 70s by critics, but I think I'll have to watch it. It's available free if you have Amazon Prime.
I do have Amazon Prime. I'll put it on my list.
I've been wanting to read something by Olga Tokarczuk for ages and held off when we put it on our reading list. Just started the book and have only read chapter 1. I'm doing my usual read and listen. The audio is read by her long time translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones. For me judgement is still out on the narration. However I am quite intrigued by the first chapter - as Mary said in post #6 I too had a mother who was a stickler for always having clean underwear on just in case. I see the narrator as a slightly eccentric loner and I agree with Mary's summation that she "probably has a clear - and perhaps inflexible - opinion of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, which may express itself in a judgemental attitude" She definitely was highly judgemental about poor Big Foot saying at one point "I didn't even regard him as a human being" and when looking at his feet " He couldn't have been human. He must have been some sort of nameless form, one of he the kind that - as lake tells us - melts metals into infinity , changes order into chaos. Perhaps he was a sort of devil"
I agree with Tamara's assessment of her in post # 9 - "quirky, eccentric" ( and thanks for the introduction to Baba Dunja's Last Love, now on my TBR list)
The following struck me in reading the text -
(1) her propensity to use initial capital letters in certain words eg Night, Ailments, Dog, Deer, Punishments - now I accept that the dog may in fact have been called Dog or that her clear affinity towards nature and animals manifested itself as the D in Deer, in her calling then the "Young Ladies", but why with the abstract nouns Ailments, Punishments? Is this another Blakean reference? Anyone more familiar than me with Blake on board?
(2) The fact that she notices that there are now only two Young Ladies when there had been at least four is a bit obvious foreshadowing the finding of the deer carcass in Big Foot's home.
(3) she gives the reader a sense of the remoteness of where these characters live - the lack of mobile signal, the winter departure of the summer resident city types, the self sufficiency of Big Foot in the forest - there's no overkill in this. I did go and check Google maps to see exactly where Kladzko was and how near it was to the border to understand the Czech network issue.
(4) I sort of liked her wish that "Death should be followed by the annihilation of matter" and that loved the phrase "metaphysical divorce". Straightforward, to the point "The end."
(5) the seemingly innocuous and unfortunate death by chocking is made neatly more ominous in her description of the bone as being "as sharp as a dagger" (albeit something of a cliche - as per Lyn's post #11 raising the question about the quality of the translation) and the gurgling of blood from the corpse.
I did check out her translator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonia... . I've never read any of her long list of translated Polish works but am asking a Polish friend if he has and what he thinks about the translation style. I did notice that Tokarczuk has changed her translator for The Books of Jacob
(6) I'm intrigued as to why she rummaged for his identity card ( Ok maybe to give to the police) , to find out his date of birth ( presumably for her astrology interest to determine if he had "Mercury in a reticent sign" or "in retrograde") , but what is "his Score"? Another capitalised noun.
(7) I was a bit concerned why they dressed Big Foot before they discovered the bone. That's interference at the scene of a death. It was slightly quaint that they considered it a neighbourly duty
(8) I'm wondering what was in the photo that made her so angry, gave her "shaking hands" and resulted in her tears ?
(9) and finally why did Oddball phone his son and why before the Police?
Onward to reading more over the weekend
Gina wrote: "Wow Mary. From that NPR site, I found out there was a movie called SPOOR from this book. It was rated in the 70s by critics, but I think I'll have to watch it. It's available free if you have Amazo..."Unfortunately Spoor is not available on Amazon Prime in the UK and I can't find it on any other streaming service here :(
Do let me know if you watch it Gina and think it is worth me searching for
I got a reply back from my multilingual ex-flat mate who is married to the native Polish speaker who has yet to reply. She says that she hasn't read DYP as yet but has read Flights which she thought was very well translated by Jennifer Croft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennife... She also told me that Complicité (director Simon McBurney) is doing a stage production of DYP at Bristol Old Vic from January 2023 see https://bristololdvic.org.uk/whats-on...
Mary, I really liked that review of the book at NPR. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. I was interested in the role that astrology played in the book.
Here is what the author said about it in a 2010 interview. See https://www.bklynlibrary.org/blog/202...
"I put astrology into the book a bit out of spite and with full consideration. I wanted to create a character who would contest generally accepted customs with her whole person. I don’t know what it’s like here in the United States, but in Poland, astrology is a pseudoscience worthy of ridicule and contempt. The intellectual establishment neither values nor is interested in it. It’s considered to be the delusion of old women or hysterical girls; it’s part of the newspaper culture. Because I was creating a character who was supposed to be a bit rebellious, even as an older person, I gave her the astrology to annoy all those who treat astrology as something silly and frivolous."
Tokarczuk herself respects the role that astrology played for centuries in helping people organize their world before science superseded it.
Thnks for all your excellent notes, Sheila. I too was thrown by those capitalizations, which sometimes seemed rather random.
Ann D wrote: "Thnks for all your excellent notes, Sheila. I too was thrown by those capitalizations, which sometimes seemed rather random."There has to be a reason for their usage
I watched the movie Spoor and thought they did an excellent job in closely following the book. Near the end, they deviated from the story in showing her "escape" in an entirely different way. Although a murderer, I enjoyed Janina, and her different approach to life. She was not a rule follower.
One of my favorite lines in the book/movie was on page 167:"Are you religious?" I had to put the question.
"Yes," he replied proudly. "I'm an atheist."
My Polish native speaker friend hasn't read this book but his comment on the translator's list was this - "Judging by the list of books which Lloyd-Jones has translated they include many first rate contemporary Polish writers."
I’m warming to the narrator ( anyone else listening to the audio version?) . I’ve realized she stresses words and intones them with the same voice that a woman I know has. I’d describe it as a cross between a child like voice in an adult and Public School (i.e private) articulation, sounding every syllable with clarity. Elocution lessons gone mad. But I think it does suit the character of Janina and her way of looking at things and speaking about them. She is clearly a well read, well-educated woman but she sees the world through a lens unlike that of anyone else but with a wonder many of us have lost which manifests itself in her descriptions and her re-naming of people and places - Oddball’s son’s “funny black coat”, the “little bridge “ that cross the stream in the village – such first grade adjectives, out of place with her more metaphorical description of the hunting cabins as “exclamation marks” and its “pulpits” , her reference to “embrasures”, “Apoptosis” and “hyleg” with each sending me running for the dictionary
Gina wrote: "One of my favorite lines in the book/movie was on page 167:"Are you religious?" I had to put the question.
"Yes," he replied proudly. "I'm an atheist.""
Gina, Every so often Tokarczuk’s writing is bringing smiles to my face as I read. She has some great turns of phrase, many make me stop and think . Here's the one's I noted so far
• “It’s easier to cope with a snow storm than a death”, when talking about her neighbour the Writer “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…..people like her, those who wield the pen, can be dangerous”;
• her preoccupation with feet to determine if a person is or is not a human Being;
• “who still uses a slide rule nowadays?”
• her minor research project a “project without funding from the European Union A kitchen -table project”( maybe that’s only amusing in Europe as in some circles it is/was a standing joke that you could get EU funding for anything!;
• her description of the world as a Japanese car; of reality having “grown old and gone senile”;
• “Let him develop English negatives to produce Polish sentence in the darkroom of his mind”
• And her great play on the word quintessence when describing the role of the word sorrow in defining the world.
Has everyone else finished reading the book? I am the only person still reading? I'm on Chapter 7
Wow, sorry I have been remiss. Life got in the way. Wonderful discussion. Sheila the photograph will become clear near the end of the book. I have no concrete idea as to why all the capitalization. I can conjecture , she capitalized the things that affected her most in her life. IE: her Ailment, Her Girls, Deer etc. These were an important part of her identity.
I just finished this a few nights ago and have been thinking about it. I really liked the character of Janina. She was obviously a very capable person, a builder of bridges and a teacher who understood what was important in education (from my point of view). She was also able to live and take care of herself in a very inhospitable area. She looked after everyone else's houses during the winter months as well. I would probably have enjoyed the book just because I like spending time with her. But, I also liked some of the other characters - Dizzy, Oddball, Good News.The writing did drag for me in certain sections though. For a relatively short book, it took me a while to read. I kept putting it down when it was dragging but always wanted to pick it back up again to get back to Janina.
I was interested in all the references to the Czech Republic just over the border. Her repeated remarks about its perfection made me think that she was being sarcastic. We traveled a bit in Eastern Europe and saw the devastation brought by the Nazis and then by Russia. Prague, in the Czech Republic, had very little of it though and I was told that it had been the least hit by bombs. Poland, however, was very hard hit, at least in Warsaw and Krakow where we stayed. I wondered if her remarks represented a general resentment in Poland because of that.
Thank you for the interview, Ann. Her explanation regarding the astrology left me wondering. That was my least favorite part of the book. I even started skimming those sections in the end. It seemed like a lot of room to devote to something just to irritate certain sections of the population.
Barb wrote "The writing did drag for me in certain sections though. For a relatively short book, it took me a while to read. I kept putting it down when it was dragging but always wanted to pick it back up again to get back to Janina."Me too. I find I can read it for about an hour before I loose patience with it. Whilst I can see that the author has created a real character in Janina, and whilst I recognise that I am a meat eater and have always thought that I could eat anything to survive I can understand her attitudes to wanton shooting for sport. Likewise it is good that she sees and notices Nature at work and I can even accept that she sees or looks for correlations between the Universe large and the universe small, likes the mental analysis of correlating planetary movements with the replay of the Alien franchise movies on TV, but if I wasn't reading it for book group I probably would stop reading, I might still even stop reading it, as not enough is happening. There's one well written character with mysterious Ailments, a few less well rounded hangers on, a couple of deaths (human and animal), and two appearances of her mother's ghost in a dream all alongside extracts and references to Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If Blake’s poem satirizes the oppressive authority of church and state which has created prisons, brothels "Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion" by not understanding that the material world and physical desire are both part of the divine order are we meant to read its parallel in DYP? I'm not seeing it yet. Or is the poem only being used as a framework to hang each chapter on? It really needs to pick up speed plot wise rather than continue to ramble on as a far too long portrait of a lonely, slightly weird but well read and articulate older woman living at the margins of society, else just as Janina tries to exorcise her mother's ghost dream I may still have to resort to the same method for exorcising this book "The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud above the toilet bowl, and then flush them away"
How far along are you, Sheila? I'm hoping you'll finish so you can tell us what you think of the ending. I haven't brought it up here yet because I don't want to spoil it for you.I kept wishing that I knew more about Blake's poetry so I could understand more of its tie-in to the structure.
Barb, I've had a bit of a detour to briefly read a bit about Blake at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet... as I felt I was missing something and Carol brought the subject of Blake's poetry up in her her posts but no one seems to be talking about "why Blake?"I'm only on Chapter VIII. URANUS IN LEO
I've purposely not read the book reviews yet (although I do know something about the ending)
I’m sorry I have been absent for so long. I thought I signed up for notifications for this discussion but apparently not. So for a while I thought no one was reading and then I forgot to check back. I finished last week and I liked the book. I’m another who doesn’t know enough about Blake to understand his place in the book.I didn’t have a problem with the astrology portion. I just looked at it as a part of Janina. I also wondered at times if she was as serious about it as she indicated or if it was a part of the persona she pushed at the world. Oh yes, I think it was Sheila who mentioned the humor. I found different types and degrees of humor throughout the novel.
I also just enjoyed the way OT writes (I know it’s in translation). I enjoyed reading the book and didn’t find much of it draggy. This is an example of different tastes for sure. I do enjoy eccentric novels with eccentric characters.
Sheila: I, too, had a temptation to stop reading this about 2/3rds of the way through, but I'm glad I persevered. The novel reminded me of The Bone People by Keri Hulme in that both deal with examining the characters of women who deliberately put themselves on the outskirts of civilization. Also, both have unique perspectives both authors are able to present in an interesting manner.What got me with The Bone People was that Hulme deliberately avoids clichés--I thought, "Oh great, lonely woman finds orphaned child and love ensues." If you read The Bone People, uh, nope. Here, Janina's obsessions are brought to the forefront and allowed a spotlight. Problem is, her thoughts and tangents are tedious at points.
Which brings me to my question: The ending of this novel. Does anyone else feel it's tacked on, a Hollywoodish twist with a everyone rode off into the Czech sunset happily ending? What the hell? I didn't need the twist; I didn't need Janina to "escape." I don't think the ending "makes" the novel better.
Dan, I'll persevere. I had a day off yesterday to visit friends.The Bone People defeated my twice :(
Dan, I felt the same about the ending. Janina was far too complex to be tied up so neatly with a bow at the end. Do you think that Tokarczuk was swayed by an ambitious editor?
Phew! Finished!Even though I found her character profoundly irritating, I thought Tokarczuk has written a well-developed, believable albeit unreliable character with a distinctive voice. Her writing is full of humour – not the belly laughing kind, but the kind that brings a warm deep smile to a reader’s face.
Plot wise the contents of Janina’s car boot was a giveaway particularly because it is mentioned at least twice - Chp 8 and Chp12 ; and I found the way she escapes via the “of course there was a third way out of the house too” route a bit too convenient.
I still think there is more to be had from the Blake, but that’s beyond me.
I had to check whether there was a publication called Oracle and True Briton and there was. It was published between 1804 and 1809 see https://www.loc.gov/item/sn88063919
It appeared to me that Tokarczuk couldn’t decide on which rights to champion – animal rights, old age rights, non-conformity both religious and social. I know lots of folks didn’t take to the Astrology aspect - for me Janina’s brain needed to be occupied by an analytical process, it needed to find reasons for how things are, a method to put chaos into order, perhaps driven in part by her Ailments which remain scientifically unnamed and unidentified throughout. Perhaps the author chose this pseudo-science not only for the Blake but also to make Janina seem even more eccentric to the reader. Also with such explanations being prevalent in historical times, this fits well alongside Janina’s connection with Nature. Judging that fine line between having a passion for something and being a fanatic about something must have needed careful writing so as not too alienate the reader from at least comprehending Janina’s actions – did it come off? I’m not sure, for me I’m just over this border on the side which says madwoman.
Taking of borders, the Czech border looms large throughout the novel and as I got closer to the end I started to ponder if there was a political satire thread going on. If the book had been written earlier I’d have thought with all its references to prisons that Janina to be an activist, imprisoned, internally exiled, and then exiled abroad.
Re Dan’s question in post 36 about the ending – it was a bit happily ever after-ish in the wonderland across the Czech border. But how else would the story have been ended – her imprisonment? – not very hopeful, conformity wins; suicide in the cellar? going off to join mother and grandmother – overdramatic. I’m not sure it was an over ambitious editor but it certainly should make for good cinema. My Polish friend says the film received mixed but generally good reviews when they saw it at the London Film Festival some years ago. (He also said that the other Polish writers Antonia Llyod-Jones has translated are all well regarded Polish writers)
I suspect Tokarczuk tried to do too much in this book and although I often found it a struggle to maintain my engagement because the character infuriated me so much, I did warm to it and I’d definitely read another of hers.
Re the humour without which I'm not sure I would have finished reading it, I think this quote sums it up perfectly "Her witty criticisms, which balance that joyful, acquiescent laughter with the other kind, wry and irreverent, are precisely the kind to get under the politicians’ skin. " https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
Re Blake, I found this analysis by a Blake scholarhttps://thehumandivine.org/2021/03/01...
The part that stood out for me was
"The name “Urizen” has also often been associated with the word “horizon” and limitations. In exploring Tokarczuk’s portrayal of Blake, we come up with the limits imposed by the boundary between author and character, and by the history of Blake’s translations into Polish (as well as national borders). Upon my first reading of the novel, I admit to being somewhat offended at the plot implications that Blake was simply a madman with a predilection for poetry and random capitalization, the latter which Janina also indulges in. "
And finally I read this review https://www.theguardian.com/books/201... which says this about translation - the first sentence of which I totally agree with"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, when Janina and her companion repeatedly attempt to translate a passage of Blake: several versions of a particular verse are rendered in English, which has been translated from the Polish, which in turn has been translated from English. It is difficult to imagine a more tricky task for a translator, or one undertaken with more skill"
Sheila, thank you for sharing g the review in The Guardian. I particularly appreciated the paragraph about the scope of the novel - so much more than a whodunnit. I also appreciated the comments toward the end about the political context in which the author lives and writes - a move to the right with attacks upon women’s rights and animals’ rights.
Sorry for being absent, I contracted Covid and went to hospital for a dy or so. Still not up to par. I am still not satisfied with the Blake aspect. Just not seeing the correlation. Okay I found this , maybe it will help explain the link.
https://thehumandivine.org/2021/03/01...
Ruth wrote: "Oh Carol, so sorry you’ve been sick!"This was a roughy, still not out of the woods.
Sheila (and others): My take--and it's not much--is that the novel could have ended revealing what Janina had done, but without anyone else realizing. They never really cared about what she had to say, about her concerns. It would have been incredible if we find out she's exacted vengeance for her wrongs and still no one figures it out and she carries on without reprisals. Seriously--that would have been a hair-raising ending."Ambitious Editor" Maybe. I consider the ending tacky and not really aligned with the rest of the novel.
Oh, I like that idea, Dan! It fits with the character of Janina for me
Constant Reader
Books mentioned in this topic
Man's Search for Meaning (other topics)The Luminaries (other topics)
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (other topics)
Flights (other topics)
The Books of Jacob (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Catton (other topics)Olga Tokarczuk (other topics)
Antonia Lloyd-Jones (other topics)
It was an odd book, especially when she threw in all the astrology information. Do you think the stars control more about our lives than we know?
By the next few murders I figured Janine was nuts enough to do the murders. Trying to blame the animals taking revenge , I realized she was not all there.