The quick and dirty for why you NEED to read Tokarczuk's seminal text
Forget reading your daily horoscope and its promises for a special someone to look your way. That special someone could very well turn out to be your killer. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk offers a captivating combination of astrological guidebook and murder mystery that will have you demanding Buzzfeed update their personality quizzes to account for those who can only be classified as a “confused-hermit-grandmother-figure-who-is-lovable-yet-also-perculiarly-unsettling.” Janina, our female protagonist, exists within this characterization conundrum: an older woman who toes the line between a lovable kook and a dangerous suspect. Tokarczuk’s ability to make you love the unlovable—the recluse, the older woman, the astrological quack, the murderer—forces readers to confront their moral convictions and aversions to the “other.” In an increasingly divisive political and cultural moment, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead challenges our rigid moral, epistemological, and literary categories. Tokarczuk creates a compelling, frustrating, and enthralling conversation for readers to enter into with Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
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