Following a long illness, she dreams and dozes, telling us, “In my somnolent state I also thought about the Czech Republic. 2 Relentlessly discontent with reality as it is, the Duszejko of Drive Your Plow often thinks about her neighbouring utopia. The village’s hunting culture is the main target of her ire, and in both the novel and the film Duszejko frequently makes a spectacle of herself as she attempts to delimit or forbid its activities, charging through her small village like an Elizabeth Costello with even less credit, arguing with policemen, hunters and priests, and ruining the school play. If the line between the two countries is unreliable, Duszejko’s divisions are absolute, her world neatly organised into good and evil. She lives at a cultivated distance from an unnamed village in the Kłodzko Valley, a forested, mountainous region that borders the Czech Republic. 1 In both Drive Your Plow and its film adaptation, Agnieszka Holland’s Pokot ( Spoor, 2017), which was co-written with Tokarczuk, Duszejko – who prefers to be called by her last name – is a committed vegetarian and animal activist. The novel turns from humorous and outlandish to controlled and commanding as Janina methodically ties the victims’ horoscopes to their brutal deaths.For Janina Duszejko, the Polish protagonist of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead ( Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych), the Czech Republic, which is just over the shifting, imprecisely delineated border, is a strange utopia. But she believes there must be a tie between the dead bodies and the routine killing of animals, even if nobody wants to hear it. The people around her don’t find her quite as amusing the police brush her off as a crazy old lady. As more bodies pile up, Janina inserts herself into the investigations. Tokarczuk’s protagonist is delightfully specific: she studies astrology, translates William Blake’s poetry and makes bizarre proclamations (“I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed”). Part murder mystery, part fairy tale, Drive Your Plow is a thrilling philosophical examination of the ways in which some living creatures are privileged above others. And his demise is just the beginning of this winding, imaginative, genre-defying story. Drive Your Plow, originally published in Polish in 2009, follows Janina, who is passionate about animal rights and at odds with the many hunters in her community–including, before his death, Big Foot. The novel is short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize, which Tokarczuk last year became the first Polish writer to win, for her novel Flights. The relationship between animals and humans lies at the center of Drive Your Plow.

Olga drive your plow