Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Review of novel by Olga Tokarczuk
This book might be categorized as a “mystery,” because there are murders which are solved at the end. But what draws the reader in is the twisted mind of the narrator — a recluse who believes in astrology and loves animals and does good things for strange reasons. In fact, it wasn’t until the very end that I realized that it was a mystery.
Each chapter begins with a quote from William Blake, and the title is a quote from his “Proverbs of Hell”:
“In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. The cut worm forgives the plow. Dip him in the river who loves water. A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star. Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
Like Blake, this author is both enigmatic and insightful.
Passages that caught my eye:
“It is in the feet that all knowledge of Mankind lies hidden; the body sends them a weighty sense of who we really are and how we relate to the earth.” p. 10
“I believe each of us sees the other Person in our own way, so we should give them the name we consider suitable and fitting. Thus, we are polyonymous.” p. 19
“I have never believed in any personalized distribution of eternal Light.” p. 39
“As I gazed at the black-and-white landscape of the Plateau, I realized that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. it lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence.” p. 47
“Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There’s no instruction manual.” p. 83
“Sometimes I think that only the sick are truly healthy.” p. 84
“There’s nothing natural about nature anymore…It’s too late. The natural processes have gone wrong, and now we must keep it all in control to make sure there’s no catastrophe.” p. 195
“… 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.” p. 224
“… my belief that the human psyche evolved n order to defend us 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.” p. 225
“The fact that we don’t know hat’s going to happen in the future is a terrible mistake in the programming of the world. It should be fixed at the first opportunity.” p. 271
