Review of "Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead"

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My oldest daughter read the book, liked it so much she shipped it to her sister from LA to DC. Then my youngest daughter mailed it to me in the heartland. Now I've recommended it to a friend in Florida, who has promised to read it soon. (Olga Tokarczuk, if you read these things, I hope you enjoy knowing this.)

There's an element of Steinbeck's comic novels in "Drive Your Plow." A highly idiosyncratic narrator whose peculiarities are very funny. A strong dose of fatalism. A quirky twist in plot resolution, which you suspect all along but remain uncertain of until you arrive at the appropriate place in the novel.

I just today read Curtis Sittenfeld's intro to the 2020 edition of Best American Short Stories, in which he states that a good story always seems to read as if it were emitted in one long breath, a sort of Allen Ginsberg notion of poetry, and Tokarczuk's narrative has that quality in this novel. Fifty years ago, readers would say it "flows."

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