by Olga Tokarczuk

An Amazon Best Book of August 2019: Janina Duszejko, the book’s solitary, 60-something main character, is earnest bordering on kooky. She writes long, unanswered letters to the police department about animal rights issues. (Hunting is popular in the remote Polish village where she lives and cares for part-time residents’ summer houses.) When she’s not preparing simple meals for herself and a former student with whom she translates William Blake on Friday nights, she’s weathering her ”Ailments” or looking for correlations between what’s on TV and the configuration of “the Planets.” Thinking that names don’t match the person (including her own), she refers to those around her by their defining characteristics: Oddball, Bigfoot, Dizzy, Good News. And it’s through her eyes that we watch the body count rise in this most unusual literary murder mystery. 

The book opens with a widely disliked neighbor found dead in his home. As more local figures are murdered, Janina develops a peculiar theory that brings her closer and closer to the truth. Between the indelible first-person voice and the pitch-perfect translation of author Olga Tokarczuk’s original Polish, it’s easy to forget that this engaging portrait of small town life is also a devilishly well-plotted crime novel. —Katy Ball

Named a best book of 2019 by TIME, NPR, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and BookRiot.

PEN America Translation Prize longlist

Warwick Prize for Women in Translation shortlist

“A marvelously weird and fablelike mystery. . . . Authors with Tokarczuk’s vending machine of phrasing . . . and gimlet eye for human behavior. . . are rarely also masters of pacing and suspense. But even as Tokarczuk sticks landing after landing . . . her asides are never desultory or a liability. They are more like little cuts — quick, exacting and purposefully belated in their bleeding. . . . This book is not a mere whodunit: It’s a philosophical fairy tale about life and death that’s been trying to spill its secrets. Secrets that, if you’ve kept your ear to the ground, you knew in your bones all along.” — New York Times Book Review

“Shimmering with subversive brilliance . . . . this is not your conventional crime story—for Tokarczuk is not your conventional writer. Through her extraordinary talent and intellect, and her ‘thinking novels,’ she ponders and tackles larger ecological and political issues. The stakes are always high; Tokarczuk repeatedly rises to the occasion and raises a call to arms.”—HuffPost 

A really good way to find further information about Tokarczuk and the sorts of things she brings to the writing table is to read the autobiography she wrote as part of the Nobel Prize ceremonies. At the same website but elsewhere on the page is the text of her Nobel Prize lecture.

Drive Your Plow was made into a film named Spoor that I found to be quite faithful to the novel—probably not a surprise since Tokarczuk co-authored the screenplay. You can rent the film for $2.99 from Amazon Prime; $3.99 from YouTube and Google Play. Apple TV has it for $4.99 when I last checked.

The March 8, 2022 issue of The New York Review of Books has a lengthy article about newly recognized cognition and emotion in animals and the ethical responsibilities that should accompany those discoveries. The article was written by a scholar who holds chairs in both philosophy and law at the University of Chicago. The first two-thirds of the article is, I think, relevant to our discussion of Drive Your Plow.

Tokarczuk conspicuously thanked the translators of her work when she gave her thank-you address in the Nobel Prize ceremony, and clearly the task of translation is especially difficult with her work, filled as it is with allusions and wordplay. The New York Times carried an article about the woman who translated and lobbied for publication of the prize-wining book, Flights, the first Tokarczuk work published in English.