Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead, 2020)

 

I enjoyed Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, although nothing about it seemed worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which this Polish writer was recently awarded.  It's smart and odd and funny -- a sort of dark eco-murder(s) mystery set in an isolated rural Polish community, and narrated by an angry, solitary, and vengeful older lady who suffers many physical ailments.  When local hunters begin to be found murdered in strange, inexplicable ways, she is sure that the animals these cruel men kill are responsible for the hunters' grizzly deaths.  She inserts herself into the police investigation, becoming a suspect in the process.

In addition to animal rights, our narrator is obsessed with astrology, and spends a lot of time pontificating on this subject, both to the reader and to her neighbors.  Like her neighbors, I found her pontification to be tedious and annyoing.

A lively book, with a strong and distinct narrative voice and vivid and original characters.