drive your plow over the bones of the dead blake

Not surprisingly, Janina is not taken seriously. Animals taking revenge on those would hunt them-for sport, for rugs, for shoes, for meals.

When others in the hamlet-all hunters-turn up dead, Janina is sure she knows who is doing the killing. And yet, Punishment had come upon the devil, though no one’s hand had guided death.” Nobody had protested, no thunderbolt had struck. One Creature had devoured another, in the silence and stillness of the Night. “He had caught the Deer in a snare, killed her, then butchered, roasted and eaten her body. To Janina, the death is divine retribution. Janina’s neighbor Big Foot is the first person in the village to meet an untimely death, having choked during dinner on a deer bone. She named her neighbor Oddball because “it reflects his Attributes well.” Janina also has a proclivity for capitalizing common nouns. She foregoes referring to people by their given names-“they’re so divorced from the Person, and so banal that they don’t remind us of them at all”-preferring monikers that “come to mind of their own accord” thus, she calls characters Oddball, Big Foot, Dizzy, Good News, and Black Coat. She teaches English at a small Catholic school, oversees the properties of several homeowners who spend winters in Warsaw, translates the poetry of William Blake, and calculates horoscopes. Janina, along with a few hearty souls, lives in the village year-round.

“everything warmer, but not our Plateau… the snow is heavier and stays put for

Village on the Polish-Czech border that bustles during the summer and emptiesĭuring the frigid, snow-filled winters. In the course of the novel, we learn that Janina was once aīridge engineer who had to give up that work when chronic “Ailments”-neverĬlearly defined-made building bridges impossible.

In a memorable first sentence that sets the tone for the story and reveals Janina’s state of herself, she tells readers, “I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.” Tokarczuk’s protagonist and narrator is Janina Duszejko, a quirky, educated woman with a passion for animals.

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead blake