In Tokarczuk’s grotesque comedy we are introduced to Janina Duszejko, an astrologer who cares for silent unkept spaces belonging to local Warsaw inhabitants -their summer homes are like corpses. Although Janina follows the Moon for guidance, she reluctantly confesses to being an amateur at such esoteric endeavors,”I see us moving blindly in eternal Gloom, like May bugs trapped in a box by a cruel child. It’s easy to harm and injure us, to smash up our intricately assembled, bizarre existence.” We are led to believe that Janina has no real home herself. She is an outcast. Yet a string of murders in her neighborhood reveal themselves one by one; the Animals are seeking revenge on Mankind. Janina reflects, as she often tends to do, “We have a view of the world, but Animals have a sense of the world.” Yet the authorities only mock Janina’s findings.
Big Foot was her first discovery. The body, twisted up on the floor, the one (of many) whom Janina despised. The one who had slain the forest animals, and displayed them with disrespect around the perimeter of his stench of a cottage. Janina takes note of everything in his home, his dirty underwear, and how his death “might have been a good thing. It had freed him from the mess that was his life. And it had freed other living Creatures from him. Oh yes, suddenly I realized what a good thing death can be, how just and fair, like a disinfectant, or a vacuum cleaner.” Janina and Oddball continue to care for the body, “Dressing the dead man was like a form of caress. I doubt he ever experienced such tenderness in life.”
Janina is anxious, and an insomniac by trade. The Sun is her Damsel.She wonders how the fields she knows so well will appear millions of years from today. Would the sky be the same color? She makes sure to wash her feet before heading to bed just in case she is taken to the hospital in the middle of the night. She has an Ailment, one that she has foreseen in the stars, which implements her own death. This is her driving force. Yet as a woman ripe with knowledge, intuition, and with her youth behind her, Janina is a prisoner in other people’s homes. She pisses red, endures a painful gastroscopy, and imagines the beautiful country beyond the Czech border. Janina has a theory, too. She believes that our cerebellum “has not been correctly connected to our brain.” She foretells a greater future than the one she experiences, if only we were able to possess “full knowledge of our own anatomy, of what was happening inside of our bodies.” Janina drinks only black tea, dry muesli crumbs settle and create a fine line of dust on her Ephemerides.
Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead is a lucid tale embossed with an array of the self-loathing characters we’ve come to expect (and long for) from Poland’s outspoken literary genius. Tokarczuk’s words keep us warm, and her 2019 Nobel Prize novel is also a book about translation: Dionizy, Janina’s previous student, had recently turned thirty, lost his job in Wrocław, and had taken to reside in a dirty concrete hostel. Soft hair, shy, accident prone, and allergic to absolutely everything he came to encounter. Dionizy (aka Dizzy) comes to visit with Janina on Fridays, which was when they would translate Blake. Although Janina had never cared for poetry, and she finds Blake’s work too similar to children’s rhymes. She wished that it were written in the “proper prose format”, then admits to being no good at translation anyways- her English mostly forgotten. She would let Dionizy stay over on those cold Friday evenings, he slept on the sofa in her study. She’d leave her bedroom door open throughout the night so that they could “hear each other’s breathing”. There is a subtle romance that takes form between the two quasi-polyglots, although it is not exactly a love that comes to fruition. Dizzy receives word that the Klodzko Gazette wants to publish his recent translations -an opportunity like this could change everything for Janina’s slovenly darling, yet this news is shortly eclipsed by his intimidation. The two decide to visit the Czech Republic to obtain access to one of the very few book shops that sells Blake.
Amidst all the literary meanderings, Dizzy becomes another unwilling witness to the unusual happenings taking place in town. Rumor has it that a wealthy man disappears; one whom owned various properties and took on a multitude of responsibilities -a delicatessen, a fox farm, a slaughterhouse…furs illegally imported from the Russian Mafia changes the conversation altogether. “So, is your poodle a dog, or a bitch?” It’s spring, and the town’s dentist, ever so recently retired, brings out his antique equipment, dusts off the cobwebs -no use to confuse the winter with bad health- it’s too dark and cold, but he treats his olde clients in the front yard of his home, illegally.
Although let’s not forget about Dizzy and Janina -there is yet another corpse that has been discovered. Our thirty something reluctant translator quick grabs a flashlight, takes Janina’s hand, and heads off into the neighborhood to do more research. They run above the olive groves, toward the evergreen ruins, a walnut tree ahead, and yet another victim-a car laid barren below. An off-road vehicle, empty inside except for a briefcase and a bag of groceries. There had been a windmill on site, years ago before the war. They followed hoof prints toward a well, where there lay the next bloody, ominous body. Her astrological reading of Dizzy: “His generation has Pluto in Libra, which somewhat weakens their vigilance. And they think they can balance hell. I don’t believe they’ll manage it.”
Still, Janina’s eyes won’t stop watering, and she is deemed by the local authorities as a threat; the old crone. She imagines they’re all waiting for the moment that she herself disappears, just like all of the others.Eventually she writes to the police station about the mass creature killings and their unspoken revenge, explaining how it all began in 1659 at a vineyard in Italy, where the owners themselves wrote a summons to the Caterpillars who destroyed their crop. Janina makes up the rules as she goes about her day. She reminisces about the past, stating how no one has the courage to think up, and administer, a real revolution. Janina refers to this exhaustion of our species as what in Greek translates to “a dropping of the petals.” And as depressed as Janina becomes, we still find ourselves listening. Especially since previously, Janina was a teacher, as well as a bridge construction engineer -among many other occupations.
Janina does possess meaningful friendships, even if her colleagues are slightly inhibited by practicalities. Our heroin has recurring dreams: she meets her Grandmother and Mother in the boiler room, where they were both “in summer dresses…as if they were off to church and lost their way. They avoided my gaze…” Janina reflects on her surroundings next, “Loud, dark clouds had been scudding across the sky all day, and now, late in the evening, they were rubbing their wet bellies against the hills. The sharp, jagged line of the horizon as if it were a strand of hair. Oh yes, Venus goes to bed in the Czech Republic.”
For more about Olga’s work visit National Arts And Cultures article.