After a neighbor winds up dead, Janina pulls out her cell phone to call the police: 'Soon after an automated Czech voice responded. There's an extended metaphor, for instance, wherein the Czech-Polish border indicates Janina's sense of restriction. And in doing so, the story has Janina, and the reader, hitting the limits of capability, of believability, even a real and tangible limit - like a national border. To get a reader to believe even fictitiously in the power of Janina's astrological readings requires a sense of staunch belief that she is indeed onto something. But Tokarczuk also pulls off some nigh-impossible feats. Janina's story suffers from a general sense of lassitude in its first third - a result of frustrated expectations brought on by an exaggeratedly-pulpy cover blurb. Tokarczuk is fundamentally a portraitist, a writer with a keen sense for sniffing out the incongruities that make a person. It's easy to invest in Janina, so thoroughly imagined is she as a character even easier to hope that she's right in thinking the dead bodies turning up all around her are acts of revenge - by animals, on the local hunters. Naturally, everyone around her thinks she's an anarchic crank. Here, Tokarczuk's protagonist is Janina - an aging astrologist who lives in a secluded Polish village right on the Czech-Polish border, who spends her time pontificating in capitalizations (Mankind, Darkness, or Perpetual Light) and translating the poetry of one William Blake.

Should she happen upon a whodunit, great! Tokarczuk is fundamentally a portraitist, a writer with a keen sense for sniffing out the incongruities that make a person - on display in her much-lauded novel, Flights, and here. The second is that it is tempting to summarize the entirety of the narrative - a whodunit! - as saucier than it is actually is tempting, but also very wrong. The first is that the book, first published in Polish in 2009 and newly translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, doesn't seem dated in the slightest in fact, it fits rather well into much more contemporary literary concerns about nature and the impact humans have on it, and the cruelty of hunting and killing animals (Lauren Groff's wonderful Florida comes to mind). Two things stand out about Olga Tokarczuk's novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead Author Olga Tokarczuk

Plough over the bones of the dead