I worked as an English teacher in Warsaw for a number of years. I taught in rooms where my shabby shoes and corduroys raised eyebrows. I taught managers, CEOs at the top of glass-age monoliths, in glistening boardrooms suspended high above the city. On smoggy days at such a height, the world beyond the window was invisible.
In one such boardroom, a certain manager had come back from a recent vacation. He showed me his phone, scrolling through photos of men in camo jackets clutching rifles, wide-grinned and triumphant. In each picture the men stood astride the limp carcass of a wild boar, its fur flecked with dark blood. I was treated to a close-up, too. Though I cringed internally, I said nothing. Though I hadn’t thought of those images for a long time since, they came back to me incessantly as I read Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, originally published in Polish in 2009 and adapted into the film Spoor by Agnieszka Holland and Tokarczuk in 2017. The novel appeared in an English version by the celebrated translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, in 2018.
Our narrator, Janina Duszejko, a reclusive former English teacher now in her twilight years, turns detective when her pet