Ольга Токарчук - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

‘Yes,’ he said, letting me in without asking any questions.

A few days later Boros came to fetch me, bringing some clothes and wigs that Good News had thoughtfully prepared for me. Now we looked like an elderly couple on our way to a funeral, and in a sense it was true – we were going to my funeral. Boros had even bought a lovely wreath. This time he had a car, though borrowed from some students, and he drove it fast and assertively. We made a lot of stops at parking areas – I really was feeling ill. The journey was long and tiring. When we reached our destination, I couldn’t stand on my own feet, so Boros had to carry me over the threshold.

Now I live at the Entomologists’ research station on the edge of the Białowieńa Forest, and since I’ve been feeling a little better, each day I try to go on my short round. But I find it hard to walk now. Besides, I haven’t much to keep an eye on here, and the forest is impenetrable. Sometimes, when the temperature rises and oscillates close to zero, sluggish Flies, Springtails and Gall Wasps appear on the snow – by now I have learned their names. I also see Spiders here. I have learned, however, that most Insects hibernate. Deep inside their anthill, the Ants cling to each other in a large ball and sleep like that until spring. I only wish people had the same sort of confidence in each other. Perhaps because of the different air and my recent experiences, my Ailments have grown worse, so I spend most of my time just sitting and gazing out of the window.

Whenever Boros appears, he always comes with interesting soup in a thermos flask. Personally, I haven’t the strength to cook. He also brings me newspapers, encouraging me to read them, but they prompt my disgust. Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us. Why should I yield to their power and let them tell me what to think? I trot around the little house, treading paths this way and that. Sometimes I don’t recognise my own footprints in the snow and then I ask: who could have come this way? Who made these footprints? I think it’s a good Sign not to recognize oneself. But I am trying to complete my Investigations. My own Horoscope is the thousandth, and I often sit over it, doing my best to understand it. Who am I? One thing’s for sure – I know the date of my death.

I think of Oddball, and that this winter he’ll be alone on the Plateau. And I think about the concrete I poured – will it withstand the frost? How will they all survive yet another winter? The Bats in the Professor’s cellar. The Deer and the Foxes. Good News is studying in Wrocław and is living in my flat. Dizzy’s there too – it’s easier for two to live together. And I’m sorry I failed to bring him round to Astrology. I often write to him through Boros. Yesterday I sent him a little story. He’ll know what it’s about:

A medieval monk and Astrologer – in the days before Saint Augustine forbade the reading of the future from the stars – foresaw his own death in his Horoscope. He was to die from the blow of a stone that would fall on his head. From then on he always wore a metal cap beneath his monk’s hood. Until one Good Friday, he took it off along with the hood, more for fear of drawing attention to himself in church than for love of God. Just then a tiny pebble fell on his bare head, giving him a superficial scratch. But the monk was sure the prediction had come true, so he put all his affairs in order, and a month later he died.

That is how it works, Dizzy. But I know I still have plenty of time.

The epigraphs and quotations in the text are from Proverbs of Hell , Auguries of Innocence , The Mental Traveller and the letters of William Blake.

Father Rustle’s sermon is a compilation of genuine sermons by hunt chaplains sourced from the internet.

My thanks to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) for the opportunity for peaceful, productive work.

And to Andrew Leader for his very generous grant towards the cost of translation.

OLGA TOKARCZUK is one of Poland’s most beloved authors. In 2015 she received the Brückepreis and the prestigious annual literary award from Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, along with Poland’s highest literary honour, the Nike Award and the Nike Readers’ Prize. Tokarczuk also received a Nike in 2008 for Flights , as well as the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for the English translation by Jennifer Croft. She is the author of nine novels and three short-story collections and has been translated into a dozen languages.

ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES is a leading translator from Polish and has twice won the Found in Translation Award, as well as the 2018 Transatlantyk Prize for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. She is a mentor for the UK’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme and a former co-chair of the Translators Association.

‘Strange, mordantly funny, consoling and wise, Olga Tokarczuk’s novels fill the reader’s mind with intimations of a unique consciousness. Her latest novel to be translated into English, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead , is simultaneously unsettling and oddly companionable… both a meditation on human compassion and a murder mystery that lingers in the imagination.’ Marcel Theroux, author of Strange Bodies

‘I loved this wry, richly melancholic philosophical mystery. It’s a compelling and endlessly thought-provoking novel, luminous with the strangeness of existence.’ Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From

‘A magnificent writer.’ Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 2015

‘Tokarczuk’s peerless travel guide is actually a guide to living. Every word, observation, reflection and story embraces the importance of staying mobile in thought as much as in being… This is as brilliant and life-affirming as literature gets.’ Saturday Paper

‘A profound meditation on time, mythology, the self and human anatomy… We drift along happily on her flights of fancy, as her travels across space give way to journeys through history and deep into the psyche. Jennifer Croft’s bump-free translation only adds to the reader’s pleasure.’ Prospect Magazine

‘Tokarczuk examines questions of travel in our increasingly interconnected and fast-moving world… Trained as a psychologist, Tokarczuk is interested in what connects the human soul and body. It is a leitmotif that, despite the apparent lack of a single plot, tightly weaves the text’s different strands—of fiction, memoir and essay—into a whole.’ Spectator

‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.’ Economist

‘The book is a personal, yet universal mythology of travel, a cabinet of curiosities, a box with old tickets, museum leaflets, shells and beer mats collected on the way. What we can touch, whether it is our own body, someone else’s hand in spontaneous dance, a crumbled leaf from a particularly important tree—all those things are imbued with meaning that, in Tokarczuk’s telling, becomes greater than the grand narratives history and politics have been feeding us.’ Glasgow Review of Books

‘Olga Tokarczuk is a household name in Poland and one of Europe’s major humanist writers, working here in the continental tradition of the “thinking” or essayistic novel. Flights has echoes of W. G. Sebald, Milan Kundera… but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own… Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness… Hotels on the continent would do well to have a copy of Flights on the bedside table. I can think of no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times.’ Guardian