“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.