I read 'Drive your plough over the bones of the dead', and I'm unimpressed

Is this really Nobel-prize winning fiction?? I know the nobel for literature is a joke, but still, the whole idea that this book is outstandingly great or notably literary is baffling.

I don't think Drive your plough is a bad book but it isn't 'Great'. It contains some moments of arresting prose, but also lots of sludge and clunky dialogue. The main character is poorly-defined and the rest are caricatures (or simply characterless). The twist ending is eye-rollingly forced. The book overall is uncertain of what it sets out to achieve, unable to commit to any particular direction, too short to explore its own compelling aspects - the shortness making everything else secondary to the hokey thriller plotline, leaving you like a dog dragged down the road past every interesting smell or piece of detritus. Isn't the exploration of these second-order aspects the central intention of literary fiction, as compared to plot-driven genre fiction? Maybe anything can be literary fiction in the postcultural landscape of the 21st century. Maybe the book is better in Polish.

Duszejko the character seems intended as an all-encompassing landscape, chilly and dense like that Brueghel painting, but her voice is unconvincing. It isn't at all difficult to imagine a sixty-year-old semihermit living in a dacha in winter poring over Blake and engaging in Faustian struggles with local officials over animal rights - but the way these considerations are written doesn't feel like they come from the mind of this character, they read more like the structured, customary musings of an academic in their mid-forties, imagining a romantic Walden-esque retirement in later life. There's no sense of the drudgery of living alone in deep country, nor the way in which inner voices disconnent and dissolve in solitude. This could be because the book is too short and doesn't spend enough time on the character's inner life, but if it was doubled in length I think we would only have got more monologues on the same themes of astrology and the habits of neighbours.

At the denouement the story collapses completely, lurching into wish-fulfilment fantasy. I was truly shocked that something so inane would cap off this otherwise interesting (if imperfect) book, but I suppose the signs were there from the beginning (not just the hinting, which I took for misdirection). Duszejko is a superlative character, stuffed with accomplishments - shot-put champion, architectural engineer and world traveller, tall and athletic despite being sixty and chronically ill - who spends the book acting as a mouthpiece for what feel like the author's pet topics*, so her presentation as avenging angel is unsurprising, obvious. It's this obviousness, this straightforward chain of causality like the plotline of a TV show, that I find so irksome and so unlike the fabric of real life with its graft and futility and impotence. Plodding obviousness is something I've cringed at elsewhere in modern fiction (severance by Ling Ma for example) - it seems that truly interesting writing is becoming marginalised in its own habitat, clinging on like rare pockets of plant life in the polar wasteland of HBO-inspired mundanity that makes up contemporary texts.

I feel that the reason this book is considered 'literary fiction' rather than what it is, a quirky offbeat thriller, is because it comes in the striking Fitzcaraldo packaging, the Klein blue of establishment literature. If it looked like a thriller it would have been judged accordingly and relegated to the dust-heap, but instead a bizzare accident has happened at the printers, the cover designs have been mixed up by some bungler and the book is acclaimed a masterpiece....

There is more to say but I will leave this here. Despite this I don't consider the book bad. It's indiosyncratic and contains the beginnings of a lot of interesting material, and it works well as an odd thriller. It's just not at all what I imagined, not what I would consider a Great Work. What do you all think?

*There's nothing wrong with this and indeed it's impossible not to do this - all literature is this - but there are ways it's done that feel fluid, and ways that feel forced - in this case it's forced