Imaginative naming

Notes from: Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

Notes from novels are my personal approach to book reviews, based on close reading of quotes and critical articles. I pull out the lines I underlined while reading and use them as jumping-off points to explore what made a book stick with me. Sometimes there’s a clear theme; other times I just follow where the quotes take me.

This Week: Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk

There are a plethora of ways to read Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, as I think Olga Tokarczuk intended. It is often shelved as a mystery, and there is a crime at its centre, but I did not particularly read it that way. I read it instead as a commentary on society, psychology, and perhaps even cosmology. A novel interested less in who did it than in how we understand the world at all.

What interested me most was Tokarczuk’s completely fresh stance on perception. At first glance, it appears eccentric but then it begins to make sense. Her narrator asks us to reconsider the categories we move through unquestioningly: names, animals, justice, coincidence and death.

It is this I want to focus on in this notes from: the act of naming and the order of births and deaths.

“What a lack of imagination it is to have official first names and surnames. No one ever remembers them.”

I am guilty of not remembering someone’s name. If we have just met and you are introducing yourself to me, chances are I am nodding along while internally trying to remember how to behave normally in a social situation.

I did this the other day, actually. I met an estate agent at a house viewing and he told me his name. I did not comprehend it at all. My mind was elsewhere — trying to look like a respectable adult interested in square footage and boiler efficiency, despite having no real idea what I was doing. At the end of the viewing he told me to send him an email, and it was only then I had to ask for his name again, because otherwise I would have had no idea who to address.

So perhaps Tokarczuk’s narrator has a point.

Is it imaginative to have a first and last name? There is often little imaginative about a surname; it has been passed down through generations, inherited like eye colour or an old piece of furniture. It may have a historical origin, but that origin rarely describes the person who now bears it.

First names feel more deliberate, though even they are shaped by tradition. Parents choose them carefully, but often from familiar pools: family names, biblical names, names already blessed by usage. Though now there is a rise in unusual names, names chosen to distinguish rather than assimilate. Perhaps these are small acts of rebellion against inherited predictability.

But what the narrator is really getting at is something subtler: to call someone only by their given name is to surrender imagination. It is to accept the official label rather than the felt reality.

You might meet someone named Dave who does not give off the energy of a Dave at all. He may, in spirit, be a Beaver.

“I believe each of us sees the other Person in our own way, so we should give them the name we consider suitable and fitting. Thus we are polyonymous. We have as many names as the number of people with whom we interact.”

Polyonymous means having many names or aliases. It comes from Greek and has historically been used for deities and legendary figures.

And perhaps that is revealing. Gods have always had multiple names because different communities encounter the divine differently. God, Yahweh, Allah: overlapping understandings expressed through different language.

Humans do this too. We simply call it nicknaming.

Take Elizabeth: Bessie, Beth, Liz, Lizzie, Buffy, Lilibet. Each variation carries its own atmosphere. Each implies a different relationship, a different intimacy, a different era of the self. We are one person, but not one fixed person. Different people summon different versions of us.

Perhaps the narrator is right: we are not singularly named but multiply known.

“As there is an order of Births, why should there not be an order of Deaths?”

The narrator believes there is an order to deaths — that each person has a time and place, that death follows a pattern we do not perceive. A kind of predeterminism.

I realised I had never consciously considered the asymmetry here. Birth is understood as process. It has sequence, timing, conditions. We speak of due dates, trimesters, development, lineage. Birth belongs to systems.

Death, meanwhile, is often narrated as randomness. Tragedy. Accident. Even when statistically predictable, it feels existentially chaotic.

We understand the biology of conception and birth, but death remains resistant to neat comprehension. We know how bodies fail, but not what it means for a life to conclude when it does. We treat birth as ordered and death as disorder because one announces arrival while the other enforces absence.

Tokarczuk’s narrator refuses this split. She asks: if one threshold has pattern, why assume the other does not?

It is unsettling because it destabilises the illusion that life is only governed at the beginning. Perhaps endings, too, belong to an architecture we cannot see.

And this is what Tokarczuk does so brilliantly throughout the novel: she takes ideas that sound mad on first hearing and slowly reveals that madness may simply be another name for a logic we have not yet learned how to recognise.