Tokarczuk, Olga "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead"

2009

(Polish: Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych) 





Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

I have read one book by Olga Tokarczuk (Primeval and Other Times) when she received her Nobel Prize for Literature. And I wanted to read more by her since then. A bookclub member lent me one now and I read it in more or less one go, it is so exciting. Janina Duszejko is such an interesting character. And the story is starting so quietly, you don't even notice at the beginning that it is a crime story which are not my favourites.

Even though she is the protagonist of the novel, you don't see her as such at the beginning. Janina is a middle-aged, slightly weird woman living in the middle of nowhere in the mountains at the Polish-Czech border where she looks after the summer houses of some rich people. She works with astrology and translates poems by William Blake. She loves animals and she is a conservationist. A remarquable woman.

Where this story leads to, I don't know. But I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in great literature.

From the back cover:

"One of Poland's most imaginative and lyrical writers, Olga Tokarczuk presents us with a detective story with a twist in DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD. After her two dogs go missing and members of the local hunting club are found murdered, teacher and animal rights activist Janina Duszejko becomes involved in the ensuing investigation. Part magic realism, part detective story, DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD is suspenseful and entertaining reimagining of the genre interwoven with poignant and insightful commentaries on our perceptions of madness, marginalised people and animal rights."

And why the German translation is called "Der Gesang der Fledermäuse" (The Song of the Bats) is still a mystery to me.

Olka Tokarczuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018 "for her narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life".


I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Original Post on "Let's Read". 

The Knight (2008), a short story by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

Well, it's not often I get to read the work of a Nobel Prize winning author the day after she is awarded the prize! 'The Knight' is a short story by Olga Tokarczuk and translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft.  This is the blurb from Words without Borders: 

I subscribe to a site called Words without Borders, a source of very interesting writing from all sort of sources.  Today, their newsletter contained a short story by Olga Tokarczuk, familiar to many readers for her novel Drive Your Plow [sic] Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones or House of Day, House of Night which was shortlisted for the IMPAC Literary Award.  But #FailingToKeepUp I haven't read either of these, so I was pleased to have a chance to catch up a little bit...

Olga Tokarczuk, who first appeared in our pages in 2005 with an excerpt from her wrenching tale of wartime survival, Final Stories, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. She then returned in 2008 with this short story, "The Knight," translated by Jennifer Croft. Tokarczuk's explorations of relationships under pressure, whether political or internal, combine a keen sense of character with a sure hand at narrative to capture the essence of humanity. As a couple's alienation plays out over a chessboard, Tokarczuk's deft portrayal of feints and attacks maps a marriage at stalemate.

The opening lines with that single word 'snatched' show the reader where the story is going from the outset:

At first she tried struggling with the locks, but they were obviously not in sync, because when she managed to turn the key in one of them, the other stayed locked—and vice versa. The wind came in gusts off the sea, winding her wool scarf around her face. Finally he set down both bags in the driveway and snatched the keys out of her hand. He managed to get the door open immediately.

Next thing, he's ticking her off for sweeping the sand off the deck. He has decided they won't be using it at that time of the year, and he has decided that he's the one who gets to decide, and he's the one who gets to tell her what she should be doing.

He puts the TV on immediately, and she protests and wants to say something else as well—but she doesn't.

Though the reader's sympathies lie with the woman because we know more about her inner thoughts, she annoys him too.  He hates it when she smokes, and he doesn't say anything.  Because though their marriage is stale, and their irritability levels are high, there's enough good will to try and make their first night at the beach house a good one, so they don't risk the second bottle of wine and they play chess. She lets him win, and he knows she let him.  They decide to play a more serious game, one that might last for days...

In 6000+ words, the story plays out over their walks on the beach, the loss of the knight from the chessboard, and their inconclusive night together in bed.  Their mutual hostilities have causes big and small, but the most telling, I thought, was her dislike of the way he photographs her all the time, objectifying her and not really seeing her as a person.

There's not much in this story to show why Tokarczuk is a Nobel laureate.  #DuckingForCover Stories of marriages bad, mad or sad, are a bit of yawn IMO, and they're all much like each other.  The Nobel citation reads 'for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.' I'm not entirely sure that I know what that means, but one day when I get round to reading one of her books, I might find out!

If you would like to read The Knight too, follow this link to Words without Borders (and subscribe to their site while you're at it).

Tokarczuk, Olga "Primeval and other Times"

(Polish Title: Prawiek i inne czasy) - 1996

Reviewed by Marianne

from Let's Read

When the name of the person who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019 was finally announced in 2020, I wanted to read one of her books right away. I had chosen "Primeval and Other Times" which is translated into German in "Ur und andere Zeiten". "Ur" really stands for a time in German, a time long, long ago. It is used as a prefix for great-grandparents etc., e.g. Ur-Ur-Urgroßmutter would be the great-great-great-grandmother. It is also a proposed supercontinent from about 3,000 million years ago.

But the book was sold out in German. I decided to wait a while. Then, our book club decided to put it on the reading list. And here I am, reading it in the English translation.

The book was interesting, something completely different from a lot of other reads. The elements of magic realism make them surreal, even though the setting during and after WWI as well as in and after pre-WWII is realistic enough. The characters were also quite lively, the families were described into every little detail, so you can imagine them and their lives very well. The author tried to describe the situation of both the German and the Russian soldiers and managed that very well, also.

Even though the story takes place in the first half of the 20th century, it seems a lot longer ago at times. The magic realism parts make it almost feel like a fairy-tale. It also helps understanding Polish culture and how it was influenced by the communism. We can live, laugh and die with these ordinary people from an extraordinary time and imagine how their lives might have been without the war.

The story is only about 250 pages long but that doesn’t' make it quick to read. It's not difficult, yet very complex. I would certainly recommend this book.

During our book club discussion, we touched many aspects of the book. I will try to add them in short. If you haven't read it, there might be some spoilers.

There were many allusions to the bible and Greek mythology, e.g. Ruta = Persephone, Cornspike = Demeter, Ruta's husband = Hades. The four directions of the village or the four faces of the angel.

The story reminded of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and other magic realism stories, even "My Name is Red" was mentioned.

The village life was like many villages but the author studied psychology, so we are sure she meant for us to draw these other conclusions.

Time is definitely a human construction.

Squire Popielski and his game was also a large part of our talk. The game represents the village and the bible the game of life.

We believe that the mythical characters like "Dipper the drowned man" contribute to the feeling/understanding of the story. Their personifications are aspects of nature.

The horror of the war came to view very well through the character of Genowefa and her reaction, it made it more real.

Food also played a big part in the book, it was a big part of life and gave comfort. Another bow to nature, I guess.
* * *

We discussed this in our book club in April 2020. To our book club members who were present in the online discussion, should I have left out anything or misquoted something, please, let me know.

From the back cover:

"Set in the mythical Polish village of Primeval, a microcosm of the world populated by eccentric, archetypal characters and guarded by four archangels, the novel chronicles the lives of the inhabitants over the course of the feral 20th century in prose that is forceful, direct, and the stylistic cousin of the magic realism in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Told in short bursts of 'Time,' the narrative takes the form of a stylized fable, an epic allegory about the inexorable grind of time and the clash between modernity (the masculine) and nature (the feminine) in which Poland's tortured political history from 1914 to the contemporary era and the episodic brutality visited on ordinary village life is played out. A novel of universal dimension that does not dwell on the parochial, Primeval and Other Times was awarded the Koscielski Foundation Prize in 1997, which established Tokarczuk as one of the leading voices in Polish letters, and it has been translated into many languages the world over.

Tokarczuk has said of the novel: 'I always wanted to write a book such as this. One that creates and describes a world. It is the story of a world that, like all things living, is born, develops, and then dies.' Kitchens, bedrooms, childhood memories, dreams and insomnia, reminiscences, and amnesia - these are part of the existential and acoustic spaces from which the voices of Tokarczuk's tale come, her 'boxes in boxes'."

Olka Tokarczuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018 "for her narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life".


Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".