Theatre can spotlight important books
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Loading... - Johnson Hannah
- 15 Mar 2023
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Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s most celebrated authors. She is also something of a controversial figure in her home country. Her 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was accused of inciting eco-terrorism when it was first published in Poland, and last year she declined an honorary citizenship from the region of Poland where she lives because she would have had to share the honour with an anti-LGBTQ Roman Catholic Bishop.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a vivid account of Janina, an elderly female eccentric – the kind of woman who often becomes invisible in society’s eyes – who finds herself investigating a series of grisly murders in the remote forest community in which she lives. While the book is at once a fable and thriller, it’s still comparatively more conventional, at least in narrative terms, than Flights, the tapestry-style meditation on travel and belonging, one of what she calls her “constellation novels”, which won the International Man Booker Prize in 2018.
This was the same year Tokarczuk received the Nobel Prize in Literature, a win that got somewhat eclipsed both by an earlier abuse scandal among the Nobel committee and their subsequent decision to also give the award to the Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, an apologist for Slobodan Milosevic. Dismayingly, Tokarczuk’s success was almost overshadowed by the actions and arrogance of men. Read More…
