Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

"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."

For a while I was speechless with shock; without a word I put on my tall snow boots and the first fleece to hand from the coat rack. Outside, in the pool of light falling from the porch lamp, the snow was changing into a slow, sleepy shower. Oddball stood next to me in silence, tall, thin and bony like a figure sketched in a few pencil strokes. Every time he moved, snow fell from him like icing sugar from pastry ribbons.

"What do you mean, dead?" I finally asked, my throat tightening, as I opened the door, but Oddball didn't answer.

He generally doesn't say much. He must have Mercury in a reticent sign, I reckon it's in Capricorn or on the cusp, in square or maybe in opposition to Saturn. It could also be Mercury in retrograde-that produces reserve.

We left the house and were instantly engulfed by the familiar cold, wet air that reminds us every winter that the world was not created for Mankind, and for at least half the year it shows us how very hostile it is to us. The frost brutally assailed our cheeks, and clouds of white steam came streaming from our mouths. The porch light went out automatically and we walked across the crunching snow in total darkness, except for Oddball's headlamp, which pierced the pitch dark in one shifting spot, just in front of him, as I tripped along in the Murk behind him.

"Don't you have a flashlight?" he asked.

Of course I had one, but I wouldn't be able to tell where it was until morning. It's a feature of flashlights that they're only visible in the daytime.

 

Big Foot's cottage stood slightly out of the way, higher up than the other houses. It was

your conventional crime story for Tokarczuk is not your conventional writer. Through her extraordinary talent and intellect, and her thinking novels, she ponders and tackles larger ecological and political issues. The stakes are always high; Tokarczuk repeatedly rises to the occasion and raises a call to arms. HuffPost 

Sometimes the opening sentence of a first-person narrative can so vividly capture the personality of its speaker that you immediately want to spend all the time you can in their company. That s the case with . . . Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead  . . .  [a] barbed and subversive tale about what it takes to challenge the complacency of the powers that be. Boston Globe 

Bewitching. . .. Serious crosscurrents explore everything from animal rights to predetermination to the way society stigmatizes and marginalizes those it considers mad, strange or simply different . . . Tokarczuk is capable of miracles and ensures that this extraordinary novel soars. Minneapolis Star Tribune 

"Sardonic humour and gothic plot-twists add a layer of macabre rustic comedy."  The Economist 
 
"One of the funniest books of the year.  The Guardian

  Written with humor, charm, and a great talent for mystery a sharp, memorable alternative to those dime-a-dozen beach bag potboilers without losing any of the whodunnit appeal. Town & Country