Everything You Need To Know About Dua’s Monthly Read, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead 

Here, the Service95 Book Club gives a round-up of everything you need to know about Dua’s Monthly Read For January, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s most celebrated authors and the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in Sulechów, her parents were teachers and she fell in love with books in her father’s school library. When she was a few years old, at home and ill, she read an encyclopedia: “This showed me the enormity of the world that lies before me and the effort I must make to understand it,” she says.

Olga is the author of nine novels and three short story collections, and her work has been translated into more than 50 languages. Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead was published in 2009 in Polish (as Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych). The English translation, published in 2018, was shortlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize. Like protagonist Janina Duszejko, Olga is a vegetarian, an environmentalist and an animal rights activist. With this nocel, she said, “I wanted to explore this question, which is at the heart of the book: what can we do as good people against a law that is bad?” Is Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead one of the first classics of eco-fiction? We think so.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Antonia Lloyd-Jones translates from Polish and is the 2018 winner of the Transatlantyk Award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

When speaking about the art of translation, Olga Tokarczuk shared that: “The English language is a kind of magic wand that makes a text written in another language immediately more universal. And the translator is the wizard who wields this wand.”

“Tokarczuk has two regular translators into English,” says Lloyd-Jones, in her exclusive essay for Service95. “People sometimes ask us how we decide who will translate what. Oddly enough, it always seems obvious to us which text is for which translator. In the case of Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, Olga felt it would be more appropriate for me to translate it because, as her contemporary, I am in roughly the same age group as the character Duszejko. Olga and I joke that we are gearing up for the time when we will be full-blooded Duszejkos, crazy eco-warriors fighting for animal rights.” 

SYNOPSIS

In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, a reclusive woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She’s unconventional: a former bridge construction engineer, a vegetarian, an astrologer, a philosopher; she translates the poetry of William Blake with her friend, Dizzy, and prefers the company of animals to people. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, Duszejko involves herself in the investigation. She writes letters to the police declaring that the wild animals of the forest are taking their revenge. She also sees ghosts in her house, and dreams of her lost dogs – her ‘little girls’. An existential eco-thriller, an amalgam of murder mystery, dark feminist comedy and paean to William Blake, Drive Your Plough Over The Bones Of The Dead caused a genuine political uproar in Tokarczuk’s native Poland.

WHY DUA LOVES IT

“The hardest thing about Olga Tokarczuk’s amazing genre-defying novel Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead is knowing how to describe it. It’s a crime novel, but much more than a mere whodunnit. It’s also a call to arms; a philosophical interrogation that is peppered with surreal mediations on astrology, and a story that will make your blood boil while simultaneously warming your heart.

“When a local hunter on a remote Polish plateau chokes on a deer bone one winter evening, his death is shocking but easily explained. But when other members of the local hunting fraternity also start showing up dead, things start to get weird.

“I loved Janina Duszejko, the opinionated and eccentric protagonist whose fixations on the radical 18th century poet William Blake, the rights of animals and the use of astrology to solve crimes take this book in unexpected directions at every turn. Darkly humorous, deadly serious and with a quirky cast of characters that will stay with you forever, this is definitely not to be missed. The author won the Nobel Prize in Literature – when you read this novel, you’ll see why.” – Dua Lipa

WHAT OTHERS SAY

“Entering Mrs. Duszejko’s rich, eccentric world is like waking up in Oz, or falling into Wonderland. Everything, from the unreliable mobile phone signal to the patterns of the wind, is attributed character and motivation, so that the whole universe shimmers with intent, agency and hidden meaning.”
Jane Graham, The Big Issue 

“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”
Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

“[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead] might be likened to Fargo as rewritten by Thomas Mann, or a W. G. Sebald version of The Mousetrap.... ”
Leo Robson, The Telegraph