Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

 Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk solidifies its author's place as one of the very best writers alive today. Ostensibly a mystery novel, it inhabits its genre comfortably while transcending it every page. The compelling-but-unsurprising plot unfolds as several bodies turn up in a remote Polish village. The old, eccentric narrator is ignored as she offers increasingly outlandish culprits for the police to investigate. All of this is fine--and well constructed--but it provides only the bare bones of the narrative. The novel is fleshed out with its many masterful motifs: ecology, astrology, religion, ageing, and the works of William Blake, from whom the book takes its title. A deserving Nobel Prize winner, Tokarczuk is a singular, brilliant mind. The three books of hers I've read so far are wildly different in terms of subject matter, form, and even genre, but she maintains a top-tier, crystalline regard for craft and detail. The chapters, sentences, and even word capitalization all serve a remarkably complete voice. Janina Duszejko, the narrator, is one of the most complete and original characters in any work of fiction, in any era.