OLGA TOKARCZUK - DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD

Image: Soaring Urizen by William Blake

I picked up this novel in a bookstore in Melbourne. They were charging a lot for it, so I didn’t buy it then, and while I can’t say whether the interim (almost a year) has seasoned me to appreciate it more, I feel thankful that I did not forget to buy this book eventually. I feel even more thankful that there’s a whole trove of work by Olga Tokarczuk out there waiting for my reading pleasure. Drive engrossed me thoroughly, and for that reason I felt the need to rush through it, though if I were to read it again, more slowly, I could spend a lot more time pondering. There’s much philosophical food to digest: it is a novel that raises difficult questions and offers the answers of a main character as perfectly constructed as she is flawed and strange. She does many things I could not see myself doing. She annoys me sometimes. And yet there is no moment when I find myself less than aligned with her. The narration, the narrative, is never less than inviting, even when the spaces (physical/cognitive) it inhabits are bleak. Tokarczuk has built a sense of moral imperative, under whose weight the novel crackles more than creaks. The novel never becomes polemical nor political, though it’s full of ideas that polemicists and politicians wish they could articulate so effectively; it presents a case that can’t help but draw a wide variety of opinions from its readership. I urge you to add yourself to this readership. Read, February 2020.