Duszejko is an English teacher who looks after the houses of summer residents in the winter months. Unlike Flights, winner of this year's Man Booker International Prize, Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead does not range across different places and historical periods but remains focused on one place, the Plateau, a remote region on the border between Poland and the Czech Republic. This mixture of graphic realism (Big Foot’s feet are described in forensic detail) and broad speculation are characteristic of the style of Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most distinctive and original voices in contemporary European literature. It’s in the touch of the earth, at it’s point of contact with the body that the whole mystery is located – the fact that we’re built of elements of matter, while also being alien to it, separated from it”. She is particularly struck by the feet of her neighbour whom she has nicknamed appropriately Big Foot and she falls to thinking, “it is in the feet that all knowledge of mankind lies hidden the body sends them a weighty sense of who we really are and how we relate to the earth. Janina Duszejko has found her neighbour dead in his house and with the help of another neighbour is making his corpse presentable for the arrival of the relevant authorities.
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