It’s her neighbor, a man she privately calls Oddball.
Janina, plagued by her Ailments (shaky hands, cramps in her legs and shoulders, numbness and tingling in her feet, watering eyes) is woken from a thin, troubled sleep by a pounding on her door. Janina confesses, “I didn’t like poetry at all all the poems ever written seemed to me unnecessarily complicated and unclear.” Yet each chapter opens with a line of Blake’s poetry, and Janina herself chooses fanciful names for every animal and person she sees, preferring “epithets that come to mind of their own accord the first time I see a Person.” Note here her habit of capitalizing certain words (others include “Night,” “Death,” and “Creatures”) which suggests she regards these as standing for something more significant than what we’d normally assume-another poetic flourish.
Plagued by nightmares of her dead mother and grandmother, she knows only one way to rid herself of them: “The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud above the toilet bowl, and then flush them away.” In her spare time, Janina helps her former student, Dizzy (“official name Dionizy”), an IT Specialist for the police, puzzle out translations of William Blake’s poetry. She licks a finger full of salt to help the brain work better. “I particularly love it when they show maps of pressure, which explain a sudden resistance to getting out of bed or an ache in the knees, or something else again-an inexplicable sorrow that has just the same character as an atmospheric front.” Janina has other eccentric beliefs and habits. Holed up at home in bad weather, Janina watches the weather channel all day long. Repeated confrontations with hunters and complaints to the police about poachers have resulted in much of the village population writing her off as “an old woman, gone off her rocker living in this wilderness.” Few people know that Janina is actually a retired bridge engineer and teacher, who presently supports herself working as a caretaker for her neighbors’ summer cottages. An elderly woman living on her own, Janina has a prickly relationship with most of the villagers. But the story Janina relates is also a meditation on aging, a paean to like-minded friendship, and, most surprisingly, a deep investigation into how astrology works.
In summer it scatters among the leaves and rustles-it’s never quiet here,” notes protagonist and narrator Janina Duszejko. “In winter the wind becomes violent and shrill, howling in the chimneys. It’s set in its present day in the outskirts of a remote Polish village near the border of the Czech Republic. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk’s excellent, odd, singular 2009 novel (translated from the Polish in 2018 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) is, on its surface, a murder mystery.
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