Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

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Had to admit I had a hard time with this for a while. Maybe not hard so much as not driven. I’d read, enjoy, but not feel compelled so much to dive back in. Tokarczuk’s narrator is an intriguing presence, but overall the book wasn’t calling me to get back in, so my progress for a while was halting, staccato. Perhaps there’s a thread very rooted in a place whose tensions I am not as much familiar with, the setting offered in a village between Poland and Czechoslovakia, where names and languages and cell phone towers tread both borders. A few deaths look like possible murders, our narrator convinced animals are taking revenge on the people. She herself is an astrologer and a part time translator of William Blake, a recluse with either a tenuous grip on reality or one more profound than we could hope for. Her voice and insights were nicely toeing an internal logic, but at times I didn’t see the thrust to keep me moving forward. But like Flights, this book grew on me, it’s last fifty pages an intriguing confrontation of our place in nature, and nicely treading reason and absurdity. Now, the book comes together for me, an investigation of the borders between things, but scarier, perhaps the lack of borders altogether. I came out of this book quite impressed.