What I Should Have Said at Book Group

Engraving by William Blake. Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash,

The other night, three of us liked Nobel-winning Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. The other five attendees did not. They found the book, translated from the Polish, too gloomy. too obscure, and too weird. When asked what I liked about it, I referred vaguely to feminism, black humor, and the book’s many references to the poet William Blake.

My answer to the question was superficial. The book, in fact, spoke to things I feel and think about every day. And also the air that I breathe, the water I swim in–a culture I’ve grown up in that I’m not always conscious of.

Here’s the book’s premise, if you haven’t read it. The novel’s main character is an eccentric elderly woman who lives alone in a remote area of Poland on the Czech border. The plot is an ostensible murder mystery: several men die in mysterious circumstances in the village around her. The woman argues strenuously to everyone who will listen that, because these men were all hunters, the animals in the forests around them took their revenge and killed them. She points to deer hoof prints in the vicinity of several of the bodies as evidence. No one listens. She may or may not be insane.

I don’t have to ruin any more of the story for you to explain what I should have said at book group.

We live in a society in which many of us–both women and men–have always felt a sense of exclusion or alienation. How many times have I been told I’m too emotional? Irrational? Impractical? Unrealistic? Too many times to count.

The novel is a fable. You don’t have to hate hunters or be an animal rights activist to appreciate the themes. The culture around us is frequently rule-bound, rationalistic, judgmental, violent, and hierarchical. (Thank you, William Blake.) We spend our tax dollars on weaponry that kills Iranian citizens and Gazans, that levels houses and villages. We conciliate gun owners who turn their guns, too frequently, on their wives and children. We take away food stamps and health insurance. We cosset entitled young men who think it’s okay to take pictures of a young woman as she’s raped and joke about it in a group chat. At our book group meeting, before the discussion began, one woman matter-of-factly described having to buy a dog for protection when she rented a ground-floor apartment. The worst insult the Vice President can imagine is to imply that another man is gay. Our President belittles “trannies” on his social media account.

In the novel, hunters, particularly “sportsmen,” are an allegory for the mindset. It’s a mindset that glories in conquest and dominance and control. It exalts man-made rules without acknowledging that men themselves made the rules. The elderly woman Janina is taking on the powers-that-be in her town, the men who are in charge, who try to convince us that life on earth is the way they represent it, without acknowledging that they created it and are maintaining and benefiting from it. She’s raising her voice as well as her fist, resisting, despite being dismissed and ridiculed.

The book is darkly funny, passionate, beautifully crafted, and unique. This is what I should have said at book group.