Janina has her own unusual theories about the murders, and these involve animals. Her neighbour’s death follows that of other hunting men in the vicinity, and suspicions begin to mount. In this story, an eccentric elderly woman Janina Duszejko recounts a series of murders happening in her small village near Kłodzko, Poland. This book by Olga Tokarczuk (the winner of the International Booker Prize Award for Flights) was translated from the Polish in 2018 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. I look forward to reading more of Olga Tokarczuk’s writing, hopefully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, whose work here is outstanding.Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – ★★★★1/2 Like Drive Your Plow, this earthy thriller full of cosmic thinking, she is unforgettable. She’s peaceable and belligerent in equal measure, pitiable and frightening at the same time. It’s a rare protagonist who contains so many eccentric, often contradictory notions, but Janina is somehow totally believable. She holds a wide range of pet theories (‘Theory’ is also always capitalised), leading to many brilliant digressions: on the ‘testosterone autism’ of middle-aged men, on how weather reports offer a useful typology of all people, on overused expressions, on ‘Lazy Venus syndrome’, on the beautiful art of translation (her buddy Dizzy whiles away hours crafting Polish versions of William Blake), on the power of Anger. It’s a clue to her intense respect for the natural world. All animals she encounters have their nouns capitalised, and some are granted names (as with Consul, the fox that criss-crosses the Czech border). She rejects most given names for people, preferring labels that sum up her immediate impression of their character or physicality – hence Bigfoot, Oddball, Good News, The Grey Lady, and more. The early chapters signal Janina’s singular perspective on the world.
She’s among the very few who can tolerate the dreadful winters there, and among of the first on the scene when a neighbour turns up dead one snow-laden night. Meet Janina Duszejko, semi-retired school teacher and amateur astrologer, who leads a quiet life on a tough plateau in rural Poland. Though it’s a fine multiple-murder mystery, it’s the narrator who makes Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead such a compelling read.
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