drive your plow over the bones of the dead sparknotes

The narrator’s eccentricity tips over into what sometimes sounds like madness-in Chapter 5, she is woken by the sound of her mother in a different room, and we are not at all surprised to discover that she has been dead for years. …and, in fact, almost all these things are true of Tokarczuc’s novel too. And when sensational things happen the reader is doubtful not only about the narrator’s account of them, but whether in fact they took place at all… A homegrown world-order is in place there too, with its own rituals and laws presented as though they are perfectly logical rather than almost completely mad. Instead of a secluded plateau, almost cut off by snow, it takes place on a near-island often cut off from the mainland, and the narrator has clearly spent far too much time alone there. I’m reminded of another first-person narrative, the almost hallucinatory The Wasp Factory (1984) by Iain Banks. She knows that if she had the expertise, nothing would ever again be a mystery to her. Despite her difficulties with it, she knows the universe to be an orderly place, and if only we could catalogue every chance event, the fall of every sparrow-a phrase she doesn’t use, because it isn’t a quotation from William Blake-we would see how they are in perfect accord with the movement of the planets. Given names are arbitrary-she hates her own, Janina Duszejko-so her two winter neighbours are Big Foot and Oddball. We gradually discover how she has created her own system of logic and morality based on compassion for all living creatures and a cosmic order she would love to understand more fully.

She does her best to make sense of the contradictions of an almost entirely male world that belittles her concerns or ignores them altogether, and whose systems and assumptions she hates. Tokarczuk’s first-person narrator, living her confusing, unsatisfactory little life on a forested plateau left almost deserted in winter, might be some sort of Everywoman.

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead sparknotes