Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Oh yes, the human body is most definitely inhuman, especially a dead one.”

Maybe I'm not smart enough for literary fiction in some cases, but this just felt boring and tedious. Janina is an elderly Polish woman who loves her astrology and animals, and quickly becomes irritated with people who don't share her extremely inflexible morals where killing (for sport, for food, for necessity) is concerned. When neighbors and villagers start turning up dead under mysterious (and sometimes violent) circumstances, Janina thinks she has it all figured out, but nobody listens to the crazy hermit who lives out in the woods.

The book's written in a stream of consciousness style through Janina's eyes, so there's entire sections of the book that really don't relate to anything. She's a bit of an oddball, sends polite registered letters to the local cops asking them to check with their force's astrologer about the murders, and does other kooky old-person-cum-dorky-detective things you'd expect. Unfortunately the author does a great job of hammering home who the culprit is almost from the beginning, and even I was able to point to the right person around 15-20% in, so it's not really much of a mystery.

It also felt kind of preachy in some places, particularly when Janina goes off (mentally) about animal slaughter and environmental problems and such. I can't tell how much of that is character-driven and how much of that is author-driven, but it came off like a finger waggy school lesson in some places. These are all real issues, but a mystery novel feels like the wrong venue for trying to get your message across.

I don't know, I didn't connect much with this book. For a Nobel Prize winner, I expected something a bit more compelling. Instead I got a lot of dead air passages where I found myself mentally checking out until Janina (mentally) found the thread of where she was going plot-wise again. There's the bones (heh) of a good, dark story here, but I felt like they were buried under way too much meaningless meanderings and social commentary.