I mainly wanted to read this novel because I was seeing everyone else read it and because of the title. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. That’s so intriguing. Turns out that comes directly out of a line of William Blake’s poem “Proverbs of Hell,” and that’s the most intriguing thing about the entire book. The most interesting thing coming from another author isn’t boding well for Olga Tokarczuk and another book of hers I recently impulsively bought that is sitting heavy on my shelf.
Drive Your Plow is supposedly a murder mystery, but with no atmosphere. It’s totally lifeless. There’s no suspense, there’s hardly any motive or drive for us to solve what little mystery there is. The book isn’t promoted as a mystery or thriller, but as literary fiction, and while it reads more like one considering the utter lack of mysteriousness or thrillingness, I don’t think it fits into the lit fic genre either. I can’t figure it out. Is it supposed to be funny? By how ridiculous it is? Is it satire, a comedy?
The randomly capped nouns and the obscure made-up nicknames that the protagonist stubbornly uses instead of real names were conjectured to be creative but weren’t actually clever. I really didn’t like the writing style. There were so many “I felt”s that I started underlining them. Within the space of two pages we get all of these gems: “I think I was terrified,” “It occurred to me” “I was moved,” “It was hard”.
The main character is very quirky (see part above about randomly capped nouns and obscure, probably disrespectful nicknames), obsessed with horoscopes, prefers animals to people, absolutely despises hunters, and comes off batty and senile to pretty much everyone. And that’s what she was to me, too. Not endearingly quirky at all. And she was absolutely defeatist. She thought the world was never made for humans, as evidenced by the harsh winter season, and she made a rather offensive observation that she didn’t understand why a pregnant woman wouldn’t want to miscarry given the world she’s bringing her child into. I hated writing that sentence, I can’t imagine actually thinking it.
The twist that we all saw coming is revealed, and then we encounter the most ridiculously unearned ending. All of the side characters come together to aid a spree killer in a way that felt unbelievable and conveyed a closeness and respect that had not been developed at all in the novel.
Now the obligatory, charitable section of the sentences I did appreciate:
“I realized that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence.”
“[A writer is] an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality—its inexpressibility.”
“We have this body of ours, a troublesome piece of luggage, we don’t really know anything about it and we need all sorts of Tools to find out about its most natural processes. […] The only coarse and primitive Tool gifted us for consolation is pain. […] Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There’s no instruction manual.”
