The Curator: astrology made me do it

A book review of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

There’s an internet joke that if a girl you’re dating asks you the time and place of your birth, you should run far away from her. Not because she’s going to steal your identity but because she’s going to try and sell it to you. Like a bootleg psychic, this girl will provide a preordained narrative of your being, a roadmap to your personality that highlights your flaws as much as your assets. You will inevitably feel intrigued, disappointed, and then disillusioned in that order by this generic profile due to her amateurism and your skepticism.

You cannot push astrology on the unwilling (I’ve learned the hard way thanks to a Capricorn).

Laugh all we want but astrology gets a bad [undeserved] rap. I understand why - it feels spooky and mystic in a way that isn’t grounded in “science” with testable, observable hypotheses about how the world works. But humans were not built to be purely intellectual, and where there is no religion, there often is a substitute. If God can’t tell you what to do, maybe the stars can.

With this experience in hand, imagine my surprise stumbling upon a book that asks us to not only accept astrology as serious business but also understand in-depth analyses of astrological events as a plot device. Drive Your Plow is more than just a novel with astrology themes, but its prevalence is striking in a novel deemed “literary”.

As a foil, when I Googled “astrological fiction” up came a list of very… interesting-looking novels. Examples include Penelope in Retrograde, Written in the Stars, and Enter a Wizard, Stage Left. These titles are overt - you know exactly what you are going to get (a lot of astrology). No other literary-adjacent titles in sight. Perhaps that says more about us (readers) or publishers than it does authors, but I find it curious that a fairly mainstream cultural idea is almost entirely relegated to the fringes of what I suspect is also deemed “women’s fiction”.

I’ve long been interested in the idea that we are all connected to the large orbs in the sky. I find astrology fills that bit of spiritual gap that comes from generally believing we are the equivalent of ants in an anthill in this unfathomable galaxy of ours. I hope to see more literature that uses astrology in a thoughtful way.

Obviously, the book today is Drive Your Plow. It was the perfect read to sandwich in between my sketchy celebrity memories and the beast that is Our Share of Night. It was cozy and slightly creepy and murdery with lots of snow! If you haven’t read it, I try hard not to spoil anything in my review.

As we are quickly approaching my second favorite time of the year, I’m looking forward to my secular holiday celebrations. It’s finally cold-ish here in Southern California, and I’m only nine business days away from my personal holiday called Twelve Full Days of No Work and Lots of Reading. I work for a state university so we may not have great pay but we sure as hell have great vacation 😎. There is something very special about not being at work but also knowing nobody else is at work either so you can be confident your inbox isn’t filling up with absolute shite.

Cheers to unbothered reading time! I wish that for you too.

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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

This one was a little bit of a looking around the room to see what everyone else is doing kind of read. Tokarczuk won a Nobel Prize in literature so clearly this is Very Important Stuff, but I’ll admit at first I wasn’t sure what that very important stuff was. While I appreciated this story, I wouldn’t describe it as a particularly good time.

Drive Your Plow is about a small community in Poland and what happens when one of its members turns up dead. It’s a murder mystery and a character study and a treatise on the treatment of animals. At under 300 pages with shorter chapters, it moves fast. There are layers, but it’s not dense.

Janina, our narrator, is a strange cat. She’s older (unspecified age), has ailments (diabetes?), and is mostly solitary but passionate about animal rights in her hunting-heavy village. She is angry and repressed, her feelings showing up as physical manifestations that leave her bedbound for days. She uses astrology and translations of Blake to guide her through life. She is in tune with nature and believes all animals deserve life and respect. Her mortal enemy is the hunter and every day she works to prevent them from killing one more animal soul.

We see the world through Janina’s beliefs and physical location. A common theme is the tension of crossing boundaries. Physically, Janina lives in Poland. She constantly remarks about the Czech Republic border visible from her village and what it is like to live there (better, of course). Each physical space in the book Janina crosses into reflects its inhabitant's or temporary owner's characteristics (usually bad). Repeatedly, people ask to enter her home and cross into her personal and, therefore, emotional space. The planets and stars are also boundaries that Janina continually crosses to make sense of an existentially dreary life.

Death is prevalent (a murder mystery, after all), but everything stops with Janina. A body becomes a body, meaningful only in how it got there; the recognition of fault; who was responsible; and how it made her feel.

It occurred to me that every unjustly inflicted death deserved public exposure. Even an Insect’s. A death nobody noticed was twice as scandalous.

There is also this strange dichotomy between personal agency and the complete lack of it, wherein Janina at once blames and explains the actions of others or nature by the stars and the individual. This is where astrology factors in heavily. She creates elaborate profiles of those around her in an attempt to explain away life. When people or animals die, we are unsure who is at fault - is it their inherent nature, or their agency? Can we change? Can we change others? If we cannot trust astrology, we also cannot trust ourselves or others.

My most favorite lesson of the novel is surely the one about a being’s right to live. No measure of productivity or creation gives one being the right to exist - it simply is; you simply are. Does the hunter have a right to take animal life? Does the animal? Or the vigilante? Is hunting the natural way of life, or are we made for something better?

Because this is a murder mystery, I must tiptoe around some aspects of the novel, but I will say the mystery wasn’t much of a mystery for me. I am unable to determine whether this was purposeful or I just read too many mystery/thrillers. There were clues, but it was more of a form giveaway than anything else. I found certain of these clues to be ingenious and on-point thematically, so it was entertaining to see them develop.

Drive Your Plow may not have been my favorite book of the year, but it sure as hell made me think.

🖤 For Fans Of: Lauren Groff, Haruki Murakami

⭐ Verdict: Astrology CAN be highbrow

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READING →

I’ve accepted that I have the audiobook taste of a 13-year-old girl and decided to lean in. I put on Jessica Simpson’s memoir Open Book and damn did it hook me from the prologue. It’s basically like watching reality TV in your head and I love it.

LISTENING →

to The Big Picture podcast Top Five Movies of 2023. It makes me so jealous that it’s easier to become a movie expert than a book expert because of the time it takes to ingest the art.

BUYING →

This Creepmas coffee mug because it IT’S WHO I AM. I also really like this one and this one.

WATCHING →

The Great British Baking Show season 14 season finale. Although we hate to see such a lack of diversity in the top three, it was emotional to look back on how far they’ve all come, especially Paul Mescal Matty. I won’t say my husband cried but there also wasn’t a dry eye in the house. The thing we will miss most? Host Allison of course.

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NEW BOOKS →

include a Booker Prize winner sparking controversy for Eurocentering civil wars & genocide, a Booker Prize longlister about a woman with autism by a woman with autism, a novel about the people selected for the last space mission ever, and a psychological suspense story that has serious film-noir vibes.

LINKS →

• This story about the vigilante mother Miriam Rodriguez is really about the depth of a mother’s love.

• How The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” became the scream-sing anthem of my generation (the comments really went off).

RESTACK OF THE WEEK →

The thing I love about Martha’s Monthly is the amazing book chats I have with her generous soul. This newsletter will get you to consider books you might never have before, expose you to new writers, and make you think.

November Reads

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LET’S CHAT

• What are your big three (sun, moon, rising)? Do you think they are accurate descriptions of your experience through life?

• If you don’t know your big three, why haven’t you asked a girl in a blanket scarf to run your chart for you?

• What are you reading right now? Anything you want to get in before the end of the year?

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In Case You Missed It

• Anxiety in the Sea of Tranquility

• The Greatest Mystery & Thriller Books of All Time

• Is There Such Thing as a Truly Scary Book?

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See you around the bookshelf!

Natalie