Olga Tokarczuk: Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead)

The latest addition to my website is Olga Tokarczuk‘s Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead). This is a superb novel from the Nobel Prize Winner. It tells the story of Janina Duszejko, an elderly woman who lives on her own in a remote Polish village near the Czech border. Various people start mysteriously dying in the village. Janine who is a great animal lover and opposed to hunting is convinced that it is the animals taking their revenge. Others have different theories. Janine, a former bridges engineer, is a lover of William Blake and his views that there is another world we cannot or will not see. She is also an astrologer, convinced that astrology can explain many things. In short, she sees the human and animal world as closely linked and the world with mysteries that most of us choose to ignore. Tokarczuk gives us both a clever thriller as well as a major novel of ideas. As she says in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech she tells stories as if the world were a living, single entity, constantly forming before our eyes, and as if we were a small and at the same time powerful part of it.

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