Reviews

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

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emizzen's review against another edition

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emotional funny mysterious reflective slow-paced

4.0

emgvr's review

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dark mysterious slow-paced

5.0

absolutely LOVED this. such a unique book in every sense - this relationship between narrator and reader is probably one of my favourites i've ever read. Duszejko is both so dryly funny and intensely emotional it's so so brilliant and i hope it's okay that i love her because i so so do. i did find a couple of tangents lost my attention but it was always gained back very quickly and i loved all the detours it took to astrology, the Polish landscape, insane information about specific beetles, all of it. so bleak and honestly heartwarming and hilarious at the same time, perfect intro to some Polish literature

bibliobrandie's review against another edition

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4.0

Literary noir / murder mystery is not typically my cup of tea and I have to admit that when I first finished this book I was like what? But it's been a few days and it's really stayed with me and grown on me. Janina, an older woman living in rural Poland, is a wonderful character and I enjoyed being in her head and observing her observations. I enjoyed her obsession with astrology and her letter writing to town officials. I wasn't really with her on the whole hunting thing (she prefers animals to humans) and thought this was just going to be a fantasy folktale.

Spoiler

But then the author twisted it and I didn't exactly see it coming, which I appreciated so much. I love the unreliable narrator trope.

"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. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless."