Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Buffalo Street Books asked if I’d lead one of the conversations in their Read Widely bookclub, and suggested this as a potential pick. I was glad to have the opportunity to re-read it, this time in English (in a really excellent translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones!), because it’s a novel where the last few chapters really makes you want to go back to the beginning. I’m not going to spoil it for you, though even telling you that much might seem like a spoiler, because, as many in the discussion noted, it’s such a quirky and meandering monologue that the mystery plot often feels almost incidental! So I wondered how it would hold up to a re-read, and unsurprisingly, being Tokarczuk and all, it very much does, and might even be better the second time around — or maybe it’s the pleasure of the discussion that makes me think so.