10 Questions To Help You Discuss Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead By Olga Tokarczuk 

Welcome to 10 Questions, where the Service95 Book Club provides you with everything you need to start your own discussion about Dua’s Monthly Read. Whether you read alone, with a book club or a group of friends, these questions will help you peel back the layers of Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, Dua’s Monthly Read for January

1. Olga Tokarczuk says her book asks, “What does it mean to be a human? And...what does it mean to be an animal?” Did it give you any answers?

2. From William Blake to Janina Duszejko, righteous anger is the pulse of this book. Janina declares, “Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision.” Where does anger lead Janina?

3. If Janina’s gender and age give her invisibility, what gives her visibility?

4. She may be isolated, but Janina has a protective community in Oddball, Dizzy and Boros. What does the book say about solitude and friendship?

5. Drive Your Plow tackles huge themes: the rights of women, of animals, injustice, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, morality vs the law, humanism, free will vs determinism, man vs nature, the Anthropocene and astrology. But did this novel make you laugh?

6. Janina’s first theory of the Commandant’s death (that the deer are fighting back) is dismissed as ‘crazy’, but is it a stretch that nature could fight back?

7. Did the book make you reconsider your relationship with animals?

8. When a film version of the book was premiered at the Berlin film festival, it was denounced by sections of the Polish press as “a deeply anti-Christian [work] that promoted eco-terrorism”. Why do you think Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead elicited such a strong reaction?

9. This novel is almost impossible to categorise: is it literary fiction, thriller, murder mystery, eco-crime or a dark feminist comedy? Does a novel need categorisation?

10. Did the ending surprise you?