Sür Pulluğunu Ölülerin Kemikleri Üzerinde (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)

Careful: this gives away how the book ends.

Janina Duszejko is a retired engineer and an elderly woman. She lives in a mountain village on the Czech border of Poland, in a place where almost nobody stays in winter.

She looks after the summer people's houses, teaches English at the village school, helps a former student who translates William Blake, and does astrological calculations.

She loves animals more than people. Her own dogs have gone missing and she calls them "my girls."

In the village, hunters begin to die.

Janina's explanation

She goes to the police and says the deaths are the animals' revenge.

She points to deer tracks. She presents her astrological calculations: she has looked at the birth charts of the dead and found a sign of death in all of them. She writes petitions, sends letters.

Nobody listens.

It caught me red-handed

At one point while reading, I was laughing too.

The astrological calculations, the words she writes in Capital Letters in the middle of sentences, the names she gives to animals, the long letters to the authorities.

It felt like a lovable eccentricity. I loved her without taking her seriously.

Which is exactly what the book is about.

When I learned the ending I had to look back. She is the killer.

All the clues were there. She had said it openly, told it again and again. Nobody listened and I did not listen either.

What really disturbs

The scenes where the police turn her away.

She is not ignored because what she says is wrong. She is ignored because of who she is.

Old. Female. Alone. Odd.

These four words are enough to invalidate a person's sentences, and you do not need to be a police officer to see it; all of us do this during the day. I did it too, inside the book.

Anyone who has felt unheard in a doctor's office reads this differently. What you say getting lighter because of who is saying it. The sentence hanging in the air. The person across from you gently changing the subject.

Tokarczuk does not build this like a thesis. She has you do it, and by the time you notice it is too late.

Her Ailments

Janina has pains she keeps mentioning. She does not name them, she says "my Ailments" and writes it with a capital letter.

She goes to the doctor and is not taken seriously. This comes from the same vein of the book: what a woman feels in her body shrinking when it is told.

The book does not say whether the pain is real. It says it should not be asked.

What the book does not justify

Janina commits murder. She kills five people and the book does not soften this.

The question it asks is narrower and more uncomfortable: what would have changed if she had been listened to?

It does not give the answer. I cannot either, and I think the question stays because it cannot be answered.

There is one more thing: the book puts hunting and what is done to animals forward as a serious matter. Janina's anger is not a fictional madness; it has grounds. But having grounds does not make the act legitimate, and Tokarczuk holds the two together.

Blake

Each chapter of the book opens with a line from Blake, and its title comes from a Blake line too.

Blake is the source of Janina's worldview: nature, anger, distrust of institutions, building your own morality.

The book works even if you miss this layer. When you notice it, it becomes a different book.

The question of genre

It is sold as a crime novel, and someone who wants to read a crime novel may be disappointed.

The suspense is low. The clues are not hidden. The killer is right there anyway.

In return, the descriptions of nature are very good. The writing of winter, forest, darkness and loneliness is the strongest side of the book and is worth reading regardless of the plot.

What an old woman does in a house where she lives alone in winter is told over pages, without ever boring you.

The author

Tokarczuk received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. This book was written before that, in 2009.

I am wary of books discovered after a prize; this book proved my wariness wrong.

It is around three hundred pages and it flows.