![]() ![]() Janina’s stewardship of the woods is challenged by the dogmatic hunting culture of the prominent authorities-including the police chief and the priest-as she becomes embroiled in the bureaucracy of the murder investigations. ![]() Then, a string of deaths transforms the sleepy hamlet into a crime scene. She is the village eccentric, with a passion for astrology and animal rights, making ends meet by tending to her neighbors’ empty cottages in the dead of winter. Janina lives alone in a remote community in the Polish southwest, in a region called Silesia that straddles the Czech border. Published in the wake of Tokarczuk’s well-deserved win of the Man Booker International Prize, Drive Your Plow is a wunderkammer of human and animal struggle and interdependence. “The fox condemns the trap, not himself,” Blake writes, setting the tone of this ecological thriller. The novel’s title is lifted from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Her interior monologue is dotted with odd proper nouns-Animals, Ailments, Night, Being-lending them weight and taking a cue from the Old English of poet William Blake. From the opening chapter of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, we already know that the aging protagonist, Janina Dusezjko, has a special understanding of the world. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |