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PRINT Courtney Byrne Luke Warde “Her writing, at
least formally, owes much to the philosophicallyinflected works of Milan Kundera” Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Olga Tokarczuk [Fitzcarraldo Editions] An Ark of Light Dermot Bolger [New Island Press] In keeping with Flights, which earned her the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is eccentric both in the technical sense of ‘lacking a central axis’, and in the more common sense of being ‘unconventional or slightly strange.’ Unafraid to splay off in digression, her writing, at least formally, owes much to the philosophically-inflected works of Milan Kundera – the lodestar of a constellation of writers from Central Europe who attempted, and who did not always succeed, in combining quirkiness with profundity. Janina Duszejko, the novel’s narrator, is a solitary, and oddly lovable, crank: an amateur of astrology, a perceptive ruminator, and philozoic to the core, she at times resembles, with her many oddities, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. Like Beckett’s vagrant, Janina muses and ruminates, offering us her idiosyncratic thoughts and observations on her inhospitable enclave, ‘the Plateau.’ These are endearingly intuitive and organic; the reactions, however seemingly asocial, of an isolated figure responding to an inhuman world, unconventional but not without their kernels of truth. Tokarczuk’s narrative unfolds around the disappearance of her two dogs – ‘her girls’ – and the mysterious deaths of members of a local hunting club, murders for which Janina blames the local deer, creatures whom she relentlessly humanises. Janina’s anthropomorphising, however, goes radically beyond any paternalistic, and altogether benign, attribution of identity to animals; instead she views them as agents, capable of taking revenge. Her position is one of radical equality, epitomised when, censured by the police for ‘having more compassion for animals than for people’, she retorts: ‘that’s not true. I feel just as sorry for both.’ Tokarczuk herself has been accused in Polish media of promoting ‘eco-terrorism’ and ‘antiChristian’ messages. With nationalism in Poland renascent, such attempts at domestic marginalisation are sadly predictable. Yet the political aspects of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead are only ever oblique, a tendency which is hardly surprising in Central and Eastern European writers to whom overtly political writing is understandably anathema. In any case, far from being evidence of prevarication, this subtlety is often as subversively oppositional as more conventional polemic, an approach which she has largely chosen to eschew. As Tokarczuk has said in interviews, her formal radicalism is itself political, her nation having been deprived the stable loam from which realism, with all its rigid linearity, grew. This isn’t to say, though, that the political is simply dissolved and redeployed as formal pyrotechnics; indeed, Janina’s declaration, ‘I love crossing borders’, reads as a kind of précis for the more explicitly essayistic Flights, containing in embryo its thematic preoccupation with, and critique of, the obligations to belong and to be rooted. Finally, Tokarczuk’s prose, which has been justly commended for its lucidity, as well as her penchant for metaphorical originality – flowers stand ‘straight and slender, as if they’d been to the gym’ – is most brilliantly rendered by her translator and friend, Antonia Lloyd-Jones. LW Dermot Bolger has released his final Fitzgerald tale: An Ark of Light. Spanning the late 1900s, this stand-alone novel describes the bold journey of self-discovery undertaken by Eva in the latter half of her life as she abandons her home in Mayo to be a teacher, a writer, and a peripatetic, losing many loved ones along the way. Based on the author’s bond with the eccentric Sheila Fitzgerald, this book blends fact with fiction, describing Fitzgerald’s many experiences and, imaginatively, constructing her personal response to them. Eva weaves a singular path through life, travelling across continents, and facing staggering losses, but while her journey is remarkable in terms of content, Bolger’s overtly self-conscious writing drains the vivacity from this novel. Lingering on the unimportant while doggedly employing worthy details as subordinate clauses, Bolger’s story remains underdeveloped. The equal emphasis given to backstories, character trivia, and milestones creates meaningless clutter, regrettably resembling writer’s notes waiting to mature into a first draft. Keen to be classed as ‘literature’ rather than ‘popular fiction’, the language is unduly specific, suffering from rampant pleonasm. Bolger inundates his readers with bland details, leaving no space for imagination, resulting in a case of reader apathy. An Ark of Light gives voice to the fascinating life of a woman born before her time, but unfortunately, her tale often lacks refinement. CB 74