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A review by leosmile
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
4.5
I took so long to read this, I think I just had such a connection to the story and characters and writing style that I knew the further I went into the book the closer I was to losing it, so I almost avoided reading it altogether. It's a funny thing of like you can't make a book in itself longer, but you can make the experience last longer, spend more time sitting in the ideas of it, there's a comfort in always having this unfolding world to return to. I loved just always having it around with me, it definitely got more beat up than my books normally do (the weather has been a little mad so some water damage was inevitable) but I think the plain blue cover actually suited having that much use, it matched the personality of the story itself. Im not fully sure if my desire to not leave the world is a negative one, like it is an entirely normal feeling but at the same time it genuinely does slow down the speed of my reading a lot, but then is the purpose of reading to learn? Enjoy? Find comfort? Maybe I'm just choosing absolutely incredible books so of course I don't want them to end. Maybe a possible root cause is reading many a long series as a kid and therefore being so used to being entirely immersed in another world for a long period of time?
This intro is so long because I don't really think I have a huge amount to say about the story itself. It doesn't feel quite like the kind of book that I can offer some super cool alternative take to that then makes this review more worthwhile than a blurb. I do think that this just isn't a crime novel, or a thriller, events do occur in this that would be typical of those genres but they way in which the events are treated is so entirely different that it doesn't matter. Maybe the ending could count but I think the ending itself was the weakest part of the book, it felt like it was trying far too hard to tie up loose ends and ended up losing the magic that the story had held up until that point.
I did really like that the main character was simply a old woman living truly alone in winter. The descriptions of astrology were really interesting and while not convincing me at all, I found them very pretty and I'm Maybe a little softer towards it as an idea now. The way she saw the world was really interesting, it was consistent but it isn't a worldview I feel I could easily put into words. Which I think means that the author did a really good job of creating a worldview so real that it is both consistent and difficult to reduce to describeable terms.
Her idealisation of the czech republic was really interesting but I don't know enough about eastern european politics to offer any level of a take. The way that nature was described was really great, the emphasis on the harsh beauty of winter in particular. I really did just love getting to hear this woman's life, her ailments, her walks along the boundary, the smallness and largeness of her life. It was a really moving read, kind of in the same way that you realise at some point that your parents are real people this feels like that but for much older people who you see pottering about and you let slip under your radar.
This intro is so long because I don't really think I have a huge amount to say about the story itself. It doesn't feel quite like the kind of book that I can offer some super cool alternative take to that then makes this review more worthwhile than a blurb. I do think that this just isn't a crime novel, or a thriller, events do occur in this that would be typical of those genres but they way in which the events are treated is so entirely different that it doesn't matter. Maybe the ending could count but I think the ending itself was the weakest part of the book, it felt like it was trying far too hard to tie up loose ends and ended up losing the magic that the story had held up until that point.
I did really like that the main character was simply a old woman living truly alone in winter. The descriptions of astrology were really interesting and while not convincing me at all, I found them very pretty and I'm Maybe a little softer towards it as an idea now. The way she saw the world was really interesting, it was consistent but it isn't a worldview I feel I could easily put into words. Which I think means that the author did a really good job of creating a worldview so real that it is both consistent and difficult to reduce to describeable terms.
Her idealisation of the czech republic was really interesting but I don't know enough about eastern european politics to offer any level of a take. The way that nature was described was really great, the emphasis on the harsh beauty of winter in particular. I really did just love getting to hear this woman's life, her ailments, her walks along the boundary, the smallness and largeness of her life. It was a really moving read, kind of in the same way that you realise at some point that your parents are real people this feels like that but for much older people who you see pottering about and you let slip under your radar.