It follows the narration of an older woman in a small Polish town bordering the Czech Republic as men go missing and are found dead. The claim might be made that it’s a more standard book than Flights, but that would probably be overlooking its radical moral arguments.ĭrive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a murder mystery. Typical of Tokarczuk, it also turns to philosophy and morality. It was difficult to read, but a masterful work that needed to be put to paper.ĭrive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, published by Riverhead Books (a subsidiary of Penguin Random House) and picking up a new translator (Antonia Lloyd-Jones), turns back to narration. There was hardly a plot to tie its disparate fragments together, essentially being a bundle of ideas, events, and prose bound together only by a theme. I then read her novel, Flights, which was a shockingly experimental work. She managed to blend prose and an intriguing story line at a perfect balance. She breathed life into a post-apocalyptic setting – often overused and dull in today’s literature, but lively and vibrant in her hands. The first piece I read from Tokarczuk was Borderland ( Granta). She refuses to abide by the standard norms of fiction and forges her own path, sometimes failing to captivate, but often presenting the reader with something unique and indispensable. Her prose is elegant yet readable, and her ideas can be both comical and deeply philosophical. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it.

Drive the plow over the bones