Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

Eccentric retired school teacher Janina Duszejko casts horoscopes, defends animal rights, supplements her pension by taking care of neighbors’ houses in winter, and emulates William Blake, from whose Marriage of Heaven and Hell the novel’s title is derived and whose epigraphs head each chapter. The rural, relatively isolated town in Silesia, Poland, where she lives, is stunned by a series of violent deaths of residents with offbeat monikers (Bigfoot, Oddball), as the townsfolk are led to believe the deaths are caused by wildlife seeking revenge. Janina, à la Miss Marple, enmeshes herself in the hunt for the culprit. Unlike Tokarczuk’s earlier Flights, with its philosophical musings and digressions, this work follows a fairly traditional murder-mystery narrative, though it’s not entirely lacking social commentary.