Locals see her as “an old woman, gone off her rocker living in this wilderness. This marvelously weird and fablelike mystery, originally published in Poland a decade ago and now translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, opens in the dead of winter on a remote Polish plateau so close to the Czech Republic the phone signal crosses it “with no regard for the national borders.” Emergency operators pick up in the wrong country, which is a problem for the novel’s cantankerous narrator, Janina Duszejko, the caretaker for the seven summer homes that dot the plateau.
Now her jones for gruesome corporeal ruminations, which was given over 400 pages to soar in “Flights,” has been grounded to great effect in “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.” Her narrators have a tendency to turn dreamy on the subject of mortality and poetic when it comes to our “definitively inhuman” human containers. But the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk (whose unclassifiable first novel, “Flights,” won last year’s Man Booker International Prize) would make an ideal funeral guest. Or people who make good dinner party guests, who know better than to foist flowers on the cook, or conscientious weekend guests, who strip the beds without being asked. There are people who make good wedding guests, uninhibited dancers with a high tolerance for small talk.
DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD By Olga Tokarczuk Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
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