Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: Artful Wildness

“I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night,” says Janina, the narrator of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Some books you read melt away, some lodge in you like a burr: I read this one a couple of years ago, and it’s still playing in my head. Janina, a wild, unforgettable creation, lives in the snowy woods of rural Poland, looks after the summer homes of city people, and teaches in a village. She has just a couple of year-round neighbors, men she thinks of as “Oddball” and “Big Foot.” She holds forth to the reader about Blake, village life, animals, the police, and astrology; Olga Tokarczuk has apparently given herself, and Janina, permission to say absolutely anything.

Here's the opening of the novel, including that ominous, funny first sentence:

I.

Now Pay Attention

Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.

I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.

Had I examined the Ephemerides that evening to see what was happening in the sky, I wouldn't have gone to bed at all. Meanwhile I had fallen very fast asleep; I had helped myself with an infusion of hops, and I also took two valerian pills. So when I was woken in the middle of the Night by hammering on the door--violent, immoderate and thus ill-omened--I was unable to come round. I sprang up and stood by the bed, unsteadily, because my sleepy, shaky body couldn't make the leap from the innocence of sleep into wakefulness. I felt weak and began to reel, as if about to lose consciousness. Unfortunately this has been happening to me lately, and has to do with my Ailments. I had to sit down and tell myself several times: I'm at home, it's Night, someone's banging on the door; only then did I manage to control my nerves. As I searched for my slippers in the dark, I could hear that whoever had been banging was now walking around the house, muttering. Downstairs, in the cubbyhole for the electrical meters, I keep the pepper spray Dizzy gave me because of the poachers, and that was what now came to mind. In the darkness I managed to seek out the familiar, cold aerosol shape, and thus armed, I switched on the outside light, then looked at the porch through a small side window. There was a crunch of snow, and into my field of vision came my neighbor, whom I call Oddball. He was wrapping himself in the tails of the old sheepskin coat I'd sometimes seen him wearing as he worked outside the house. Below the coat I could see his striped pajamas and heavy hiking boots.

"Open up," he said.

With undisguised astonishment he cast a glance at my linen suit (I sleep in something the Professor and his wife wanted to throw away last summer, which reminds me of a fashion from the past and the days of my youth--thus I combine the Practical and the Sentimental) and without a by-your-leave he came inside.

"Please get dressed. Big Foot is dead."

I’m already in love with Janina as she begins by telling us about her nightly ritual of washing her feet (an intimate detail, but not the deliberately charming or erotic intimate detail of a performative vulnerability) and how she’s expecting at any point to be taken away by an ambulance. So we’re not going to be hoping or wishing for anything along traditional lines: Janina falling in love, getting married, grappling with an urgent job crisis, trying to save a wayward child. Her story’s informal and strange in content, oddly formal in word choice and tone, and with a whimsical capitalization that emphasizes her eccentricity and distance from conventional norms, giving us the sense that she lives in another time or world.

In my last MPP piece, I wrote about Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, a novel where the narrative voice spins through many lives and consciousnesses, omniscient and close, third person and intimate. Tokarczuk gives us just one narrator, but because of the loopy, digressive fierceness of Janina’s approach to life, this literary thriller still has that sense of wild motion. She lives out in the wilderness, but there’s nothing small about her world.

By the long and unnerving second paragraph, the action has started as Oddball is banging on her door with the news that Big Foot is dead. Unlike Oddball, she’s sleeping in a linen suit (a hand-me-down from one of the couples whose house she looks after), and his surprise shows that after all this time he’s still not used to her ways. But even in this high-drama paragraph, Tokarczuk is taking time to detail Janina’s emotional and physical state, the temperature of the pepper spray can, the crunching of the snow, and the clothes she and Oddball are wearing. Also, Tokarczuk prepares us for Janina’s later musings with “Had I examined the Ephemerides that evening to see what was happening in the sky, I wouldn't have gone to bed at all.” Janina’s quite certain that she knows the future from her astrological studies. And although this big second paragraph feels rather artless, including her confessions about her “Ailments,” she’s preparing herself for a possible fight, showing her willingness to do battle, which will matter later in the book.

She can’t stop philosophizing even in a moment of crisis (or rather has no interest in refraining from philosophizing), but her conclusions are so peculiar that as a reader I am working to understand her and to compare what she’s saying against an experience of the world, so it feels electric and unsettling (“I sleep in something the Professor and his wife wanted to throw away last summer, which reminds me of a fashion from the past and the days of my youth--thus I combine the Practical and the Sentimental”). Her lengthy digressions about Blake and astrology help make up the fabric of the novel, like Tolstoy’s decision that the last third of a book is the very place to try to figure out the nature of war.

Tokarczuk used to be a psychotherapist, and her visible pleasure in Janina’s ways of conceiving of the world make me think she would have been entirely sympathetic to her clients and perhaps even delighted in the more rococco elaborations of their cognitions. (Is that not our favorite kind of therapist? Or maybe that’s just me.) She herself lives in a remote village, and, as so often in fiction, some of the book’s inventions that seem most surprising and inventive come as a gift from real life. Here’s her description of her home from her interview with Marta Figlerowicz in The Paris Review:

Many of the people in this area, myself included, feel that we’re living on the ruins of an alien civilization. It had always seemed to me that I heard the hum of water within the house, and no one believed me until we did renovations in our cellar. When we dug out the foundation, it turned out there was a stream running right underneath. That’s how the Germans used to construct homes on the slopes of mountains—they didn’t fight the water, they just let it flow right through the buildings. The people who have chosen to settle here since the war have tended to be eccentrics, oddballs—disparate people whom fate has brought to the region. At one point, I was neighbors with three different translators of William Blake—that obviously inspired Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. This basin seems to attract them, as it does other mystically inclined people—lovers of Meister Eckhart and of Jakob Böhme. 

Part of what makes Tokarczuk so great is that she’s not hiding, or taking for granted, what’s most interesting and peculiar in her life. She’s won some prizes, obviously, and also stirred up some controversy. But the courage it took to bring Janina out of whatever world she lived in before Tokarczuk “made her up,” or perhaps pulled her into this one, shows up in the bravery and vulnerability of Janina herself. In the ever evolving and surprising ruins of our civilization, it’s a delight to spend time in the company of a character so absolutely herself and so committed to wildness of all kinds.