Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
3.97
I just now finished the book and wanted to write how much I enjoyed it. What an original voice, written so clearly about deep subjects with a kind of poetry of its own. She managed to conjure a world of people and animals so particularly of their country (Poland and Czech Republic) and yet timeless and current. I'll be thinking about it for some time.
This book might not appeal to everyone. The protagonist is a "crazy old lady" who goes in for serious Astrology, hates hunters, is a vegetarian.....quirky, very bright and funny too.
"In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, the prose is by turns witty and melancholy, and never slips out of that distinctive narrative voice." from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
The action of the novel, the title could be translated as a quote from Blake’s Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead, takes place in a remote mountain settlement in the beautiful Kotlina Kłodzka. That quiet, tranquil location suddenly is a place of murders of local hunters, with only animals’ tracks left on the crime scene. Revenge of the game?
Favorite quotes:
“The human psyche evolved in
order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching
sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system - it makes sure we'll
never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information,
even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be
impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny
particle of the world is made of suffering.”
“You know what, sometimes it
seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide
what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then
we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves.
The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it
hard to understand each other.”other.”
