Olga Tokarchuk
Drive your plow over the bones of the dead
Translated by Anastasia Hatzigiannidis,
editor Kastaniotis, p. 286

Police texture, intelligent deer, well-done translations of William Blake, reliable philosophical inquiries, perfectly choreographed turns, underground references to Carl Jung’s creed, comic-tragic developments, successive sharp interludes, interjections of fictitious data, convincing characters around, but also non-standard characters, caustic satire, conversational landscapes of northeastern Europe: the author was born in 1962 in Sulehoff, Poland, was awarded the prize in 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, a polyphonic, ecological, among other things, narration emerges here. It goes without saying that the lessons of modernism and its functional offshoots are fully learned. The reader’s absorption is accelerated by the warm Greek translation.

The heroine of the novel named Janina Dusseiko, a former bridge engineer, lives alone. It is enough for her to talk with forest animals. He also adequately understands the psychology of so-called dead matter. In other words, it’s a mixture of a female Robinson Crusoe, Hypatia, Marguerite Yoursenaard and Emily Dickinson. Her little village is her essential universe. Her confessions testify to her direct, functional connection with the essence of reality. He stays sober. I single out, by the way, the following indicative from page 70: “I grew up in a wonderful time, which, unfortunately, has already passed. There was a great willingness to change and the ability to create revolutionary visions. Today, no one has the courage to invent something new. They constantly talk only about the current situation and develop old ideas.

Reality is old and crooked, because it definitely obeys the same laws as any living organism – it gets old. Its smallest components, meanings, undergo apoptosis, like somatic cells. Apoptosis is a natural death caused by fatigue and exhaustion of matter. Translated from Greek, this word means “falling petals.”

The world has lost its horseshoes.” The “refinement of life” harmoniously coexists with sharply metaphysical prejudices. The dimension of the symbolic corresponds to all the separate parts of the narrative. In fact, on pages 94, 104, 126, and 141, the subject of deep confession does not hesitate to jokingly jump into the realms of theology. And nature, as emphasized on p. 152, seems to obey exclusively the dictates of an inexorable will. Here the text refers to the meeting of Olga Tokarczuk with the famous Dresden and Frankfurt recluse Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who persistently taught precisely this in his work The World as Will and Representation.

From one moment, consecutive kills of hunters fill the diegetic scene with blood. Cold-blooded murders haunt the legend. Unraveling the chain of secrets will lead to the most unexpected criminal. The reversal of the archetypal hunt is the final find of the narrative. Animals are not the prey of systematic carnivores, but creatures that, in turn, must be protected. Looking for, if possible, competent allies among the wingless bipeds, animals claim the support of readers. Thus, a real ethics of anti-predation is developed on the pages of the work.