Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarozuk: A review
Olga Tokarozuk, Polish writer, feminist, and activist, was belatedly awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, announced earlier this year. She also won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her previous novel, Flights . This latest novel made it to the shortlist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. The woman is obviously on a roll so it was time I made her acquaintance and I decided to start with the intriguingly titled Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead . I learned that the title is a quotation from William Blake's Proverbs of Hell . The narrator of Tokarozuk's book is a part-time English teacher who is obsessed with Blake and is engaged, with a partner, in translating his works to Polish. The narrator is Janina Duszejko who hates her own name as well as the names of her neighbors. She prefers the nicknames that she gives them. Names like Oddball, Bigfoot, and Dizzy. Our narrator was a civil engineer by profession. She is now in her 60s and, in addit...