The August choice for my Childless Collective Nomo Book Club is "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead" -- a somewhat quirky/offbeat noir-ish mystery/thriller by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from the original Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), first published in 2009.
Janina Duszejko leads a reclusive life in a remote corner of Poland near the Czech border, eking out a living by taking care of the summer cottages in the area during the winter months for their wealthy owners in the city, and teaching English one day a week to the local students. She also studies astrology and plots out horoscopes for the people around her, and is helping a former student translate the works of William Blake into Polish. And she's a passionate advocate for vegetarianism, animals and nature. The locals regard her as a bit of a crank, and she's a thorn in the side of the local hunting community.
Then one of Janina's neighbours dies under mysterious circumstances -- and then another, and another. Janina has her own theories about who (or rather what) dunnit -- but can she get anyone to listen to her?
I'll be honest, I didn't quite know what to make of this book or how to rate it -- although there was a lot I liked about it. The writing/translation was vivid and evocative. The setting seemed oddly familiar to me (as a Ukrainian-Canadian who grew up in isolated rural areas with seasonal cottages and harsh winters, often near the U.S.-Canada border -- minus the mountains, lol). And I liked that Janina is a strong, independent, older female character -- although she's rather prickly and might be "difficult" to have around as a neighbour...! (Even so, it was maddening to see the patronizing way she was treated by the local authorities.) People address her as "Mrs. Duszejko" but there's no mention of a a husband. She does talk about her "Little Girls" throughout the book -- and it took me a while to realize she was referring to her dogs, not children (there's the pronatalist influence for you...!)(although we do specifically choose books for the club where motherhood/children are not a focus).
As an English major at university, I took a course on the Romantic poets, where I remember studying some William Blake -- although I remember very little about it. I did find Janina's random capitalization of certain words (somewhat like a certain U.S. President, unfortunately...!) rather annoying. And while I respect Janina's concern for animal rights and her revulsion for hunters and hunting -- and share some of those feelings, to a point -- I did find her views on the extreme side. (I grew up in areas where hunting was common -- several of my uncles hunted, although my dad never did -- but I will admit I could not and cannot relate to their enthusiasm for it at all, and being around guns, even when they're hanging on a rack on the wall, makes me extremely nervous.)
3.5 stars on StoryGraph, rounded up to 4 stars (after some internal debate...!) on Goodreads.
This was Book #23 read to date in 2025 (and Book #2 finished in August), bringing me to 51% of my 2025 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 4 books behind schedule to meet my goal. :) You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2025 tagged as "2025 books."
Sounds interesting. I love reading books set in unusual locations. I wonder how much of her personality was simply that, or whether it was a cultural thing that came through.
ReplyDeleteI was also interested in your thoughts re hunting and guns. My father and all his brothers hunted. Mostly ducks (!), and there's a photo of me as a little girl holding some ducks he'd shot. (They were delicious. lol) He also hunted deer, but had to travel a long way to get to the forests where they roam. (All introduced - so culling them helps our native trees etc). And they were used for pest control too.
My father and mother and uncles, and now a niece, have all been involved in target shooting (and a cousin's daughter has a silver medal from the Olympics in shooting). So for me, I never saw guns as dangerous to humans. They simply weren't seen that way, in NZ society at the time. But elsewhere, and certainly more these days, I would be distinctly uncomfortable with them.