Olga Tokarczuk's DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD (tr Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

"Nobody takes notice of old women who wander around with their shopping bags."

With a title lifted right out of William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" and a cranky old Polish woman spinning us a yarn that keeps wanting to devolve into just another cozy mystery except she just won't let it, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead feels like it was written just for me. I know I say that about a lot of books, but I contain multitudes you know?

Yes, I know, that's not from William Blake.

The cranky old Polish woman in question, and our narrator of questionable reliability, is an astrologer-cum-schoolteacher-cum translator-cum property manager named Janina, and she lives in a sparsely populated region of Poland so near the border with the Czech Republic that most of the time, if residents try to call emergency services, their call gets bounced to a cell tower in that other country and gets a recording in the Czech language. This makes said residents both frustrated as hell and very self-reliant, none more so than our Janina. Who hates that name but never really gives us one she'd prefer to be called, so I will christen her Crank.

Hey, it's very in keeping for how she addresses and talks about her neighbors. Very keen on thinking deeply about language, she hates the idea of personal names being meaningless sounds bestowed on a person by their parents before anything is known about us besides how many fingers and toes we have and if we've got a winkle. So her nearest neighbor is called Bigfoot, and her next nearest is Oddball, and her best friend and partner in translating William Blake into Polish is called Dizzy.

Lest I convey the very wrong idea that this is a charming and quirky story, though, well, it isn't. Crank is embittered as hell, embittered as only a passionate defender of animal rights can be when she lives surrounded by poachers, riders of noisy and polluting all terrain vehicles and bands of hunters who stride in formation through her beloved woods shooting in unison at pheasants and ignoring her pleas to stop and listen to her for just a moment.

Then one day, Bigfoot turns up dead, choked on a bone from a deer he'd poached*. And some other deaths occur. All with at least two things in common; proximity to Crank, and the apparent or explicit involvement of animals. Most want to chalk these deaths up as accidental; Crank thinks she's witnessing a string of animal revenge attacks that makes them murders! Who is right?

That's basically the plot of the novel. Interesting enough, but what makes it stand out is, of course, the prose, brought to very vivid but agonizingly slow life in the audio edition by Beata Poźniak**. "Winter mornings are made of steel. They have a metallic taste and sharp edges," Crank observes one morning, for example. There are tons of gorgeous little prose bombs waiting to explode in your head and realize that Tokarczuk and Lloyd-Jones are a hell of a team and Tokarczuk is definitely a Nobel laureate.

For me and my kind there are added bonuses, including a character (and possibly a love interest for Crank; it's nicely ambiguous) who is an entomologist deeply engaged in study of and efforts to conserve a bark beetle (which, yeah, people who know me know that I have a grudge against bark beetles for destroying so much of my beloved Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, but it's really not their fault so much as human management policy's fault that they've run rampant there for decades, unchecked by the natural fire cycle and whatnot), and not just another character who is a mushroom picker but a whole society of mushroom pickers, so involved with one another and so organized that they throw a costume ball every summer right before the season for serious 'shrooming begins.

Finally, I want so much to gloat over how much I admire the last 20% or so of this book but it's really almost impossible to do without spoilers, which just kills me, but there you go. Drive that plow right over me, I dead.

And yes, I'm going to need to listen to this one again real soon, because it's that kind of book, one of my favorite kinds, that promises to be a very different read the second time around. Hooray!

*Having eaten my share of deer over the years, I cannot figure out what bone in a deer's carcass would be small enough for a man to choke on, but maybe it's a fragment? Either that or Tokarczuk and/or Lloyd-Jones think that deer bones are just like fish bones?

**Seriously. This is the first time I've resorted to bumping up the narration speed as I've listened. I found 1.30x to be adequate, but 1.0 was just too much as Poźniak draaaaaaaaws oooouuuuut allllllmost eeeeeeeveeeeeryyyyyy syyyyyyyyyyllable in her authentically Polish accent.

100 Books #110 - Nicholas P. Money's TRIUMPH OF THE FUNGI: A ROTTEN HISTORY

When the author gets out of his own way and just lets us enjoy his material, Triumph of the Fungi: A Rotten History is as interesting and entertaining a book on the subject as one could wish. From Dutch Elm disease to the Potato Blight, Money surveys the history of fungal plant pathogens and their economic and aesthetic impact on the landscape in just the right amount of detail; one feels like a mycologist but isn't having to slog through a lot of soil chemistry data, which is enormously appealing to a lay reader like me.

What isn't appealing is a prevalence of what I can only describe as authorial snottiness; Money lets his personal opinion intrude on his storytelling just enough to be annoying, if not downright offensive: in his speculations about the origins of Dutch Elm disease, for instance, he tells us "I'm all in favor of blaming the Chinese, but in this instance they seem faultless"; pages later, describing the efforts of an early pioneer in research on a disease that all but wiped out coffee production on Ceylon/Sri Lanka, a pioneer who just happened also to be a reverend, he describes him as "a curate with presumable devotion to Christian superstitions" for really no reason at all other than to sound like a jerk, it feels like (to this reader, anyway).* Honestly, I can't believe an editor let stuff like this slide. Once I noticed this tendency, I couldn't stop seeing it, which often spoiled my enjoyment of a book for whom I am exactly the audience.

This is especially frustrating because the book is also full of fascinating bombshells of insight, as when Money points out how the results of a lot of early researchers in to Dutch Elm Disease had their results pretty much ignored because they were women, and a lot of dumb theories and ideas that came from men got credence, "frustrated progress in understanding the nature of the problem." Or when one Thomas Lipton -- yeah, that Thomas Lipton -- saw opportunity on Ceylon and started buying up rust-fungus-ruined coffee plantations to grow cheap tea on.* Or that "Plant pathologists can serve a [sic] excellent vectors of fungal disease." Or that the chromosomes packed into the zoospores of the potato blight fungus contain around 22,500 genes (for comparison, human chromosomes encode around 24,000).

See? Fascinating!

And we won't even talk about the chapter on chocolate. Oh my!** (Well, okay, maybe a little "...imagine massively swollen gentials in response to an infection of  your pituitary gland and you'll grasp a human analogue of this plant disease.")

But then the obnoxiousness makes a return in a chapter about fungal pathogens on rubber trees, in which the author makes as many condom jokes as he possibly can and throws in one about an exporter waiting anxiously for a rubber stamp in a colonial office. Har.

Overall, though, this is a great read. I especially appreciate the criticisms of modern agriculture that are gently buried in this text: fungal disease epidemics only really happen in monocultures; the bigger the plantation**, the bigger the problem. And while Money (wonderful name for a writer about economic threats such as these, eh) never says it outright, really, the worst thing that ever happened to these plants we exploit isn't really the fungi; it's us. Or maybe we're the best thing. Maybe these plants, like some have said that maize/corn does, are actually exploiting us, giving us a little something useful in exchange for our efforts to spread them, keep them bug and disease free, and in general let them take over the earth at the expense of other plants not "smart" enough to provide something we find useful or tasty?

And then, maybe, aren't the fungi the really smart ones, since they've let us humans do all the work of setting them vast banquet tables for them to enjoy?

Lots to think about, when we think about fungi, no?

*Oddly, the victim of this barb, Rev. Miles Berkeley, gets spoken of in seriously glowing terms later in the book. So, you know, why even make a remark like that in the first place? Once I got to the chapter wherein Money describes Berkeley as a "great man" all I could think about was this stupid dis earlier in the book. ARGH.

**And this after Lipton got into the retail business after his family fled the potato famine in Ireland, so "it might be said that Lipton was an improbable beneficiary... of two of history's worst fungal epidemics."

***Theobroma cacao... food of the gods, threatened by, among other things, Witches' broom/escoba de bruja.

****Some nicely subtle digs at slavery there, too.