Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Ratings163
Average rating3.8
thought-provoking novel about man's inhumanity to animals. Very quirky and a bit hard to get in to initially, but actually wound up liking it a great deal.
2.5 Stars - but honestly the more I think about it, the more frustrated I am.
This book was...interesting. It was an enjoyable enough read through the 90% of the book where I didn't know what the main thesis was supposed to be (which isn't even a positive really), and though I often found it hard to empathize with the main character in the way that the narrative seemed to want me to, I was willing to keep trying to force myself to have an open mind. Then the last two chapters of the book happened, and all of a sudden even the smallest of details that I previously liked were unimportant, or even thematically contradictory, and instead of enjoying the ending all I was thinking was that it was a badly structured and messily characterized book full of superfluous threads that didn't actually add up to anything impactful.
See, here's the crux of the issue: the narrative, with all the knowledge the ending grants, wants you to like the main character so badly, and wants you to agree with her POV so much that every “enemy” she has is a caricature of a mustache-twirling bad guy [who all gleefully murder people's pets, and then say things like "You shouldn't be sad your dogs died, they don't have souls and you're evil for mourning them"...like, who in the world would actually say that to someone who just lost a pet?!], every ally she has supports her no matter what [To the point of smuggling her out of the country when they find out that she is a serial killer. I do not understand why their devotion to her is this over-the-top.], and anyone in between those extremes are mindless drones who, according to our main character, are brainwashed robots who can't think for themselves.
A large majority of this book is spent on astrology, and I'm really grasping to understand the point of this in the end. She writes “serious” letters to the police saying that people are dying because of where the planets were when they were born – but am I, the reader, actually supposed to take her seriously? If it was intended to be taken seriously, the narrative majorly fails at convincing me of that. Similarly, the other majority of the book is spent talking about animal rights – but again, in kind of comical terms that made it difficult to suss out whether I was supposed to just suspend my disbelief and agree with her, no matter how ungrounded her assertions were, or whether she was purposefully written to sound unhinged [ It seems clear in the end that the author did actually mean for her to be the only "sane" person - all culminating in the scene in the church near the end, where she is standing up and yelling "Murderers!" at the entire congregation. Problem being is that I wasn't thinking "Yeah, you tell 'em" - I was thinking "This is weird, but kind of funny if you imagine actually witnessing this?".].
And in the end, it is revealed that she was the murderer, or was acting on behalf of the animals, but not consciously because she forgot immediately afterwards, but not really because she remembers all of it in great detail now and she was premeditating each murder in depth. Also murdering animals is evil, but her murdering people is fine? And all of her friends and acquaintances are totally okay with all of this, and they all help her escape and live a happy life.I couldn't help but think that the book would have been much more sympathetic and narratively coherent had the murders actually been committed by the animals, and the "twist" was that you were reading a bizarre dark fairy-tale all along - where animals conspire to seek revenge, the movement of the planets really did preordain everything, and it turns out that all of this woman's out-there ideas about Animal Conspiracy Theories were actually accurate. Instead we got a "who done it!" "twist" where the answer only made me retrospectively realize the amount of meandering and pandering that took place in the lead up, all to culminate in a straight-faced assertion that this woman's actions were somehow justifiable because...eating meat is bad.
Basically, any strengths this book had were revealed to be major weaknesses, and any nuance was ironed over in favor of drawing everyone in starkly black and white moralistic lines.
I really struggled with this one. The author won the Nobel prize in literature and the Man Booker and this came highly recommended, but at no point was I able to really fall into the story. I had to go back and reread what felt like most of the book. I really wanted to like this one, the premise and writing were both very unique but overall I couldn't get into it. Still finished it to see if anything redeeming happened toward the end but ultimately wouldn't recommend.
I thought this was delightful. A portrait of a small community of recluses living on a wind-swept Polish plateau. Our heroine is an elderly part-time teacher, and full time astrology junkie, who is regarded as a madwoman by the nearby community, because of her conspiracy theories and preference of animals over people. Then the parish is hit by a string of mysterious deaths...
The writing is exquisite, and I especially like how this book doesn't seem to fit any clear label.