Book Club: Part Three

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

“Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges. On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it’s plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Bookclub theme: FREESTYLE

Book suggested by: Rebecca

Rating: average of 4/5 ★★★★

Aimee: 4/5★★★★

Ciara: 4/5★★★★

Jesse: 4/5★★★★

Marianne: unread

Rebecca: 4.5/5★★★★

Yaz: unread

This book was wild in all senses of the word. It feels like a cold front slipping in under the door, snow falling unseen in the middle of the night. The descent is quiet, slow, and entirely earned; you don’t realize that your breath has turned to fog until you step through the door without your coat on. I should preface this by saying it was an incredible read—but my review may be a little light. It is the kind of book that needs you to resist discussion with people who have not read it, for fear of unravelling all the threads that make it so hauntingly special. Any true delve into this work would result in spoilers that I simply can’t share with you. But, if you read the book, please reach out because what an amazing discussion we had at book club once all the answers were in the palm of our hands. If you have your own book club, I highly suggest it.

Summary.

In a remote Polish village near the Czech border, winter presses down like a judgment. The woods are deep, the nights longer. Janina lives alone at the edge of it all, mapping the stars, translating William Blake by lamplight, and tending to the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents who do not care to stay for the cold. To the locals, she is eccentric at best—mad, more likely. She prefers animals to people, lives by astrological signs, and speaks of the forest with reverence.

Then hunters begin turning up dead and Janina thinks she knows who the killer is.

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is less a murder mystery than an incantation. It thrums with feral energy and quiet fury, blurring the lines between sanity and wildness, justice and vengeance. The book hums with menace and mourning, full of strange laughter and slow-building rage. Tokarczuk gives us a story where the land itself speaks to us, and where solitude is not loneliness but something far more powerful. It asks: what is madness in a world already mad? And who gets to speak when no one wants to listen?

“I see everything as if in a dark mirror, as if through smoked glass. I view the world in the same way as others look at the Sun in eclipse. Thus I see the Earth in eclipse. I see us moving about blindly in eternal Gloom, like the May bugs trapped in a box by a cruel child. It's easy to harm and injure us, to smash up our intricately assembled, bizarre existence. I interpret everything as abnormal, terrible and threatening. I see nothing but Catastrophes. But as the Fall is the beginning, can we possibly fall even lower?”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Published in Polish in 2009, it was translated into English in 2018.

Background.

“We have a view of the world, but Animals have a sense of the world, do you see?”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Olga Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual whose work straddles the borders of myth, memory, and modernity. Trained as a clinical psychologist, Tokarczuk brings a deep, searching insight to human nature—her fiction thrums with folklore, mysticism, and an acute awareness of the unseen forces that shape us. It almost reads like a fairytale, which as we know, often have undercurrents of the thriller genre.

While reading, I initially assumed the story was set in the past because of the strong emphasis on the border near Janina’s house and how the setting itself felt like a character. I had to remind myself that the novel takes place in contemporary times, which made the experience even more intriguing as a reader.

“In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences: in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

She is one of the most acclaimed voices in contemporary European literature. While the sticker on the book makes it look like this book won the Nobel Prize, it is actually far more rewarding. In 2018, Tokarczuk herself was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I didn’t even know that was a possibility. That same year, her novel Flights won the Man Booker International Prize, cementing her place on the global literary stage.

Her prose is often mythic, her voice defiant, and her stories deeply attuned to history’s ghosts and the natural world. With her work being translated into more than 40 languages, she is definitely a force to reckon with, just like the characters in her novels. To read Tokarczuk is to step into a world where logic and magic coexist, where borders blur—between nations, between species, between sanity and revolution.

Thoughts.

“Sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

This is one of the most quietly arresting novels I have read in a long time. It takes its time—absolutely a slow burn—but deliberately so. There were moments when I had to step away, return later, and recalibrate my focus. The book lulls you into a strange sense of safety, a cocoon of isolation built from snow, solitude, and routine. And then, without warning, it snaps your attention back with something sharp, uncanny, or quietly devastating. While in the middle of the experience, I was wondering if I truly enjoyed it, but I think that is the point: the rhythm mimics the landscape, the isolation, the disjointed logic of grief and obsession. Even amidst the investigation of strange murders, the stakes feel fairly low and we get to watch Janina try to unravel the mysteries.

Inspired in part by the poetry of William Blake, you can feel his influence in the prose. Tokarczuk’s writing is lyrical, philosophical, and packed with grand, sweeping statements about life, death, and the futility of trying to control either. It is beautifully written, and uses its narrative as a container for ideas that stretch far beyond the frame of the plot: climate grief, animal sentience, the Anthropocene, the weight of patriarchy, and what justice can look like when the natural order has been corrupted. Regardless of plot, it is a beautiful book from start to finish.

“The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system - it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.”

― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Though I would not call it a thriller in the conventional sense, it is mysterious; layered and quietly disorienting without ever feeling artificial. One of the most impressive elements is how it blurs past, present, and future, letting memory and speculation bleed into each other until chronology feels less important than conviction. The flashbacks are especially sharp, and some scenes (including one involving a dentist that is both horrifying and deeply satisfying) have stayed with me in vivid detail. I love whenever people showcase the terrors of going to the dentist.

“Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us. Why should I yield to their power and let them tell me what to think?”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

During our book club, we discussed how this novel manages to walk the line between satire and sincerity, between critique and chaos. It is, among other things, an excellent exercise in examining hypocrisy—both personal and systemic. At times, it feels like the book might be preaching…but then it turns the lens inward and questions its own certainty. It is not a manifesto. It is a mirror, cracked and strange.

There is a quiet, slow-motion revenge running beneath everything. The revenge of animals, of nature, of the silenced. And in the process, we are reminded: borders have many meanings. Rats have been to court. And madness may not be the worst thing to carry in a world that does not reward care. I’m not sure if I have ever read a climate thriller before, although climate-fiction is slipping into all the books I’ve read lately, simply because the state of our world and our climate. It’s impossible not to see the threads in everyone’s word, subconscious or fully realized. It’s entering my own writing.

“Anger always leaves a large void behind it, into which a flood of sorrow pours instantly, and keeps on flowing like a great river, without beginning or end.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

I find this book very interesting, because even though I rated it fairly highly, I wouldn’t say it is my favourite. But it was so well written and gave us so much to talk about. I thoroughly enjoyed our discussion and breaking it down. In terms of rating the craft of a novel and not just enjoyment, this is one of the best examples I can think of to rate highly on the scale.

The only major critiques I had were around the setting and one emotional thread that felt a bit underdeveloped. Geographically, the location is clearly important to the plot—but as someone who slept through most of her Social Studies classes, I found some of the political and geographical context a little hard to parse. That said, by the end, I realized it is less about where this is happening and more about what the place represents. Unlike Notes of a Crocodile (our first book club pick), which is deeply tied to its setting in Taiwan, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead just needs borders—literal, psychological, ideological—and a sense of remoteness. The isolation does the heavy lifting.

Also, without giving too much away, there are some beautiful, haunting scenes involving her mother that I wish had been more fully woven through the rest of the novel. They served a clear purpose, and they hit hard when they arrived—but I would have loved to see that thread carried just a bit further.

And if anyone does think it is preachy, I’d love to discuss why I now disagree (I thought this while reading, but changed my mind at the end). But we can only truly discuss once you have fully read the book!

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In exciting news: I get to pick the next book club read! Finding a book that fits a genre I love while still appealing to everyone in the group was tougher than I expected. But I have been wanting to read this one ever since it came out. I was looking for something clearly speculative fiction, yet subtle and accessible—not too in-your-face with the genre elements. This seemed like the perfect choice, and I’ve heard wonderful things about it. I can’t wait to dive in and discuss it with everyone.

Our next book: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lamai

Thanks for reading <3

xx,

Ciara

Bibliography:

"Olga Tokarczuk." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Tokarczuk

Anthony Cummins, “Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk: ‘We live with violence and misogyny like some sort of constant illness,” The Guardian, October 5, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/05/nobel-prize-winner-olga-tokarczuk-empusium-health-resort-horror-story-we-live-with-the-violence-and-misogyny-like-some-sort-of-constant-illness

"Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead," Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51648276-drive-your-plow-over-the-bones-of-the-dead?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=YKKDHoLQP6&rank=1