Book reviews: Plows and Cactus Boots

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones).
My rating: five stars

I really don’t want to say too much about this book. Because I feel that to say too much would rob you of the absolute fucking joy of reading it for the first time yourself.

(Yes, it’s that good.)

This is the first Tokarczuk I’ve read, so I’ve no idea how it fits in with the rest of her work. If it’s anything to go by, though, finely-honed observation and dark comedy should feature strongly. It’s at once a crime novel, a comedy, and a philosophical treatise, a mixture that shouldn’t really work but just… does.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead tells a small story – the tale of a woman in a tiny village surrounded by unexpected deaths – which manages to address enormous human (and animal) concerns. The narrator, Janina, is an odd duck who gives villagers suitable nicknames (usually something less than flattering), and who details the aspects of village life in a particularly droll manner.

Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.

This small, odd life becomes a bit more complicated as other villagers start dying. Well, not dying: being murdered. By animals? Potentially. Or is there more going on? Janina decides she’s going to find out. Her investigations reveal a lot more about the village – and her view of the world – than expected.

The best conversations are with yourself. At least there’s no risk of a misunderstanding.

What results is a dark delight that examines the world and our interpretation of it. I found this slim story to be an absolute joy, which is somewhat at odds with the subject matter, but here we are.

If you’re going to read anything I recommend, I’d like it to be this. I was delighted with it, and I hope you are, too.

America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic by Phillip Freedenberg (illust. Jeff Walton).
My rating: three stars

Look, I really wanted to like this one. Lots of the sort of book wankers I circulate with on Twitter (not X, because it makes it sound like a porno conference, and trust me, book nerds are probably not the sort of people you want to admit to picturing naked for the most part) lauded it, and there seemed to be a raft of five-star reviews. A maximalist, postmodern pisstake? A book that writes itself? A meditation on the act of writing and a tool to enable the reader to join the unified field along with any other schmoe who had perused these pages? Sounds pretty fucking great, right?

I wish I were as dazzled as others have been. Or maybe I’m just jaded? I’d heard that there was a sort of Pynchonian brilliance within, but I guess I found it to be a little more towards the Robert Anton Wilson dribblecup end of the literary yucks spectrum.

(I fully admit that there’s people for whom this would be a Good Thing, and I wish them a 23 fnord and all the happiness in the world.)

I’m a big fan of this book’s publisher, Corona\Samizdat, because its figurehead, Rick Harsch, appears to be completely bonkers in a delightful way. (Go buy some books from him – you’ll get way more than you paid for, trust me.)

So too, it seems, are the creators of this book (which I think of as Cactus Boots for brevity’s sake, though brevity is not an ally of this tome). The book is – amongst other things – the story of what two bearded blokes get up to while waiting for a copy of a Rick Harsh book (The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, a real title). Turns out that they start writing a book which is a bit like a cross between House of Leaves typographical experiment (though much more MS Word-bound, I think) and that Wyld Stallyns album that will unite the world someday.

Conspiracy? Synchronicity? It’s all here. Rick Harsch becomes a kind of trans-dimensional revealer of secrets, and as an unholy trinity (the two creators (Freedenberg and Walton) and their will-be-but-isn’t-yet-or-is-he? publisher (Harsch)), the three bearded blokes attempt to bring Better Living Through Typography to a thinly-disguised world of post-Trumpian, neuromantic brain-drain.

The book jumps around a fair bit, and expects the reader to do so as well. There’s a bunch of detail in the text – so much so that the effect of reading some parts is very much like being struck with the feverish word virus that afflicts the creator-characters at some point. However, this glossolalia is also something that proved a bit of an Achilles’ heel for me: it felt a little bit like Markov-chained busywork.

(In addition, my work-eye couldn’t help but notice some copy-editing clangers, which seemed shockingly out of place in a work so dedicated to the selection of words.)

It suffices to say that I didn’t have the same experience as a lot of other readers, and that’s fine. There were parts of the book that I really enjoyed, and I dug some of the silliness (competitive ironing!) but I almost felt as if the duo didn’t go far enough. I wonder if this might’ve been better as a kind of outlandish, Wu Ming-esque anonymous collective work? Parts of the text hint at the creation of the author, that the two dudes making their way through word tunnels towards an Izola-ensconced godhead might just be story themselves and… well, I wish they’d kinda gone there. There’s a lot of fun moments throughout, but for me it didn’t gel. I guess I’m not in the cult. Or I am, but I’m the guy who hangs up the coats at the meeting rather than the guy who dishes out initiation rites.

I think the mistake I made was in having my own copy of Eddie Vegas was in the house before I picked up this one. Had the palpable wait for a Harsch buzz been part of my experience, maybe I’d have decided to do a bit of textural fracking of my own, and who knows where we’d be then, eh?

Anyway, I’m glad people are writing things like this even if they’re not a winner for every reader. I like stuff that takes risks, because even if I’m personally a bit bummed by the result, at least someone’s got the gumption to leap into the void. And who knows? It might blow the fucking hair off other readers – and in this hopefully post-Trumpian wilderness, we need all the opportunities for hair-blowing at we can get.