Well, it’s interesting that she calls it a classic murder mystery, because we did have some classic murder mysteries in front of us of the 108 to judge and this really stood out because of its differences. It is a murder mystery, and therefore it rattles along, but it’s also a philosophical contemplation on man’s relationship with the natural world, and our relationships to those that we deem to be marginal—at the edge of society—and how we react to them. So it’s incredibly saturated with thought throughout. The title is taken from lines of William Blake and there are passages throughout where characters celebrate Blake’s ideas and philosophies. So it’s incredibly rich, and it’s really transportive, both metaphysically and physically. You feel like you’re inhabiting the spaces and landscapes that are being described. We didn’t know what to expect, and we were all absolutely blown away by it. “Tokarczuk doesn’t seem to care about seducing the reader. She’s not using cheap tricks” We loved the fact that sometimes Tokarczuk doesn’t seem to care about seducing the reader. She’s not using cheap tricks to get the reader on board. And despite its rather bleak title, there’s a lot of humour in there. So yes, it’s a fantastically rich book. Absolutely. In the judges’ comment, we talked about Drive Your Plow as being an indictment of humanity in its casual corruption of the natural world. So it’s very of the moment.
"Well, it’s interesting that she calls it a classic murder mystery, because we did have some classic murder mysteries in front of us of the 108 to judge and this really stood out because of its differences. It is a murder mystery, and therefore it rattles along, but it’s also a philosophical contemplation on man’s relationship with the natural world, and our relationships to those that we deem to be marginal—at the edge of society—and how we react to them. So it’s incredibly saturated with thought throughout. The title is taken from lines of William Blake and there are passages throughout where characters celebrate Blake’s ideas and philosophies. So it’s incredibly rich, and it’s really transportive, both metaphysically and physically. You feel like you’re inhabiting the spaces and landscapes that are being described. We didn’t know what to expect, and we were all absolutely blown away by it. “Tokarczuk doesn’t seem to care about seducing the reader. She’s not using cheap tricks” We loved the fact that sometimes Tokarczuk doesn’t seem to care about seducing the reader. She’s not using cheap tricks to get the reader on board. And despite its rather bleak title, there’s a lot of humour in there. So yes, it’s a fantastically rich book. Absolutely. In the judges’ comment, we talked about Drive Your Plow as being an indictment of humanity in its casual corruption of the natural world. So it’s very of the moment."
The Best Novels in Translation: the 2019 Booker International Prize ·
fivebooks.com
"I originally picked up this book just because of the title. Later, I heard that Olga Tokarczuk had won the (delayed) 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, and it made total sense because this book (originally published in 2009, released in English translation in 2019) is both deeply strange and deeply personal – a kind of noir murder mystery with feminist, leftist, vegetarian and academic undertones. Gorgeously written and immediately engaging, it is a complicated story about deer, hunters, age, infirmity, chaos and William Blake, driven by the rigorously no-BS practicality of its elderly narrator, Janina Duszejko, who is trying to figure out who is murdering all the hunters in her small, snowbound Polish village, all while contemplating the greater mysteries of life, Poland and the universe in general."
