Astrology is back in the mainstream and has been for a while. Astrologer Barbara Shafferman recommended a book that she discovered by chance – it just happened to be about an astrologer – 2009’s literary and mystery novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. It’s a good read that says something about the contemporary human condition.
Janina, our protagonist and narrator, is a retired teacher living in rural Poland. She has a passion for studying astrology and helping a student translate William Blake’s letters. A vegetarian, she tries to live simply and shares great empathy with animals. But she suffers from debilitating health attacks and nightmares about her dead mother, while also finding herself in the midst of a series of local murders.
The book is part detective story and part psychological study: we get to know this marginalized woman living in an unbalanced, harsh environment. Her frustrations in dealing with the corrupt, ineffectual and even violent local authorities are very relatable since her age and unconventional beliefs make her someone who’s not taken seriously.
Janina admits she’s not a good astrologer, and maybe she’s not, as she puts small animals in the 3rd house. It’s hard to know whether the use of words like quadrature (for square) or cosmogram (for horoscope) were a translator’s lack of expertise or a choice to make Janina seem quaint (she also talks of using a slide rule for calculations). Does knowing her date of death support that the character is unrealistic or show the writer’s limitations on the subject?
Janina has some lovely thoughts about her place in the universe:
“The world is a great big net, it is a whole, where no single thing exists separately, every scrap of the world, every last tiny piece, is bound up with the rest by a complex cosmos of correspondences, hard for the ordinary mind to penetrate.”
Tokarczuk clearly knows astrology herself as she refers to it throughout the text; she worked as a Jungian therapist before her writing career. Born on January 29, 1962 in Sulechrow, Poland, she has the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn all in Aquarius – no surprise for someone attracted to astrology!
I won’t reveal the ending, but I found Drive Your Plow engrossing, with a skillfully balanced plot and the extra bonus of following a real character whose astrology – for better or worse – is part of the tapestry of her life.
Buy Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead on Amazon.com
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