Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel

Danse of the Macabre
Sly, peculiar and quite funny.This novel by a recent winner of the Nobel for Literature is structured as a murder mystery and features a quite peculiar protagonist. The narrator is an older woman who is living deep in a forest, a rural, resort community in Poland near its frontier border with the Czech Republic. She lives there year round, and during the winter months she makes the rounds as a sort of caretaker that looks after several nearby vacation homes in the off-season. She also has a part-time gig teaching the local schoolchildren who want to learn English.Her favorite poet is William Blake, and there is a snippet of Blake’s visionary poetry at the head it’s starting every chapter. Due to health reasons, she no longer practices her original profession, which was Civil Engineering. Her main intellectual preoccupation is with astrology. The funniest passage is one where she and two male friends smoke some weed and start expounding on the theme of why there is Evil in the world. This is in the wake of the discovery of additional murders carried out in rather gruesome fashion. In Blake’s cosmology, of course, Evil is inherent, a legacy of the Fall. Our astrologer assures them that in fact Evil is due to the influence of Saturn on human affairs. Several additional explanations are proferred — this is certainly the philosophical conundrum that all organized Religions grapple with. No, it is definitely Saturn, according to our intrepid guide to these bizarre events.The novel opens with the discovery that one of her neighbors has died, apparently in a gristly accident. One of the peculiarities of the heroine is that she calls most of her friends and neighbors by descriptive nicknames: the original murder victim is Big Foot, her closest neighbor in the forest is Oddball, a lively young woman that runs a local thrift store frequented by the narrator is Good News. A young colleague that she collaborates with in translating Blake’s poetry into Polish is Dizzy.Darkly entertaining, deeply disturbing, and quite resonant. Excellent!

UNPUTDOWNABLE
GREAT story

Janina Duszejko, loveable sociopath
Janina Duszejko is a many-dimensional person. Surely bright, surely a bit deranged by the standards of the people in the town she lives above. One can imagine the most normal description of her being the index finger circulating next to the temple. Loveable to the reader, frustrating to the lumpen proletariat in the little town, and (we learn to our surprise), a stone sociopath.All in all, fascinating.The book is told in her first person, and it becomes obvious early that Janina’s an odd duck. “What a lack of imagination it is to have official first names,” she says. And there’s her juxtaposition of science (built a bridge in Syria, disagreement with the common belief that phenotypes are not heritable) and non-science (astrology), as well as the fascination with William Blake, an eccentric’s brilliant eccentric. As such, she’s an unreliable narrator of the best literary sort.Tocarczuk’s writing is beautiful, both in descriptions of place and people and in the wanderings of Duszejko’s mind. Sometimes the mind wanders too much for too long. Sometimes convenient plot elements appear out of thin air (as in, Oh yes, a small, apparently weak 60-ish woman was second in the 1971 national hammer throw … how convenient).All of that said, the book seems to me an odd choice for a Nobel prize. Of course, the Nobel in literature isn’t just about writing. Looking back over the last dozen or so, it’s always about fine writing (literary forms, of course). But there seems to be a desire to spread the prize around the world and to address social issues that are both topical and congruent with the Peace Prize’s aspirations. Tocarczuk’s writing is beautiful, both in descriptions of place and people and in the wanderings of Duszejko’s mind. Literary writing—check. The book is from a tortured venue (Poland), and Duszejko underlines that by her belief in the beauty of the cross-border lands of the (democratic) Czech Republic. Congruency and geography—check. The wealthy, entitled hunters; the power structure uninterested in Duszejko’s truths; the feminist undercurrent (“with age, many men come down with testosterone autism.”) Oddball is nuanced, as is Dizzy (though certainly not driven by testosterone), but the rest of the men are caricatures of testosterone autism. Social issues—check. But (spoiler) the sociopath and her friends find murder of hunters perfectly all right, and she lives happily ever after. How does that fit with the Nobel aspirations?

森の脇にいくつも別荘があるが冬のあいだは空き家となるチェコ国境のポーランド片田舎。そこに棲みつき空別荘の面倒をみている初老の女性ジャニーナは体調不良をかばいつつ星占いに凝り、森の動物たちをこよなく愛し、そのためハンターを憎み、そしてウイリアム・ブレイクの詩にどっぷり浸かる 人目には狷介とみえるも至極真面目に生きている。静けさを破って男たちが一人また一人奇怪な死を遂げ、警察は事故死と判断するが ジャニーナは近くにある鹿や狐の痕跡と当人たちの星座から「絶対に動物の復讐だ！」と再三にわたり長い手紙を警察に出し、周囲から「厄介な人物」と迷惑がられている。元エンジニアで理屈っぽいジャニーナの一人称で紡ぐ話だが毎日の出来事にあわせて独断的な星座のチェックにブレイクの詩が絡み合い、通読したときは「なんだかなあ・・」という感じだったが、外国の書評子たち（Goodreads）がとんでもない長さで蘊蓄を傾けているのを読み、「せっかくのノーベル賞作家の本だし」と「ブレイク詩集（岩波文庫）」を求めた。なるほどタイトルがこれか “地獄の格言：死者の骨の上に汝の荷車を駆り、汝の鋤をとおせ（松島正一訳）”　（ブレイクの詩は古い時代を反映していて 凡人にはどれも松島氏の注釈がないとよって立つ意味がわからない。）それにしても本誌全編に散りばめてある詩の各片が結構な意味を持つかも、で、もう一度始めから読み直した。やっぱり普段読んでいる直球勝負のミステリ小説ではなかった。余韻たっぷりながら少々満腹気味。　文中所々で普通名詞が大文字で始まっており首を傾げていたが上記松島氏の解説ではブレイク時代はそういう書き方があったそうで 作者もそれに倣って言葉を強調しているのだろうか。

I simply loved It! I sympatize with the author’s ideas and love her style. I also appreciated the translator’s work. It’s definitely the best book I read this year and I will certainly read more books of this author.