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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

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  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9780525541349
ISBN10: 0525541349
Condition: Standard


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List Price:$17.00
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From Powells.com

Staff Top Fives 2020-2021

Our favorite books of 2020-2021.


Staff Pick

Meet Janina. But please do not forget that she cannot tolerate her own name and that she prefers to name the people around her according to their personalities or physical characteristics. She lives alone in a small, rather remote Polish village maintaining several properties for people who have summer homes there. She dabbles in astrology, translates William Blake, and is an animal lover, and one day her two dogs do not come home. Around the same time a neighbor turns up dead. She is convinced that deer killed him in revenge for his hunting them. No one believes her and other victims are found with animal tracks nearby. Recommended By Paul S., Powells.com

Olga Tokarczuk knows how transfixing an unreliable narrator can be. In this novel, main character Janina fills her reclusive days by studying astrology, translating William Blake, raging against cruel animal hunting practices, and caretaking vacation properties in remote Poland. Janina's idiosyncrasies are somehow profoundly relatable. She's fascinating enough as is, but then a brilliant murder mystery weaves into her life. This novel's strange, snowy plot tumbles forth from there, finally reaching a profound conclusion. Recommended By Lindsay C., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind...

A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

Review

"Drive Your Plow is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it's one of the most existentially refreshing novels I've read in a long time." The New Yorker

Review

"A brilliant literary murder mystery." Chicago Tribune

Review

"Extraordinary. Tokarczuk's novel is funny, vivid, dangerous, and disturbing, and it raises some fierce questions about human behavior. My sincere admiration for her brilliant work." Annie Proulx

About the Author

Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland's most celebrated and beloved authors, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize, as well as her country's highest literary honor, the Nike. She is the author of eight novels and two short story collections, and has been translated into more than thirty languages.

5 2

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating 5 (2 comments)

`
Weems , January 09, 2021 (view all comments by Weems)
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.

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`
Weems , November 29, 2020 (view all comments by Weems)
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.

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No

(2 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment




Product Details

ISBN:
9780525541349
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
08/11/2020
Publisher:
RIVERHEAD BOOKS/PENGUIN PUTNAM
Pages:
288
Height:
.70IN
Width:
5.00IN
Author:
Olga Tokarczuk
Translator:
Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$11.95
List Price:$17.00
Used Trade Paperback
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
QtyStore
1Burnside

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