flights [olga tokarczuk]

Flights is almost two books for the price of one. The book is constructed around the notebooks of a travelling woman, who one takes to be the author, as she moves around the world, reflecting on the nature of travel. These observations are made up of brief sections, often less than a page long. In amongst these observations are threaded various stories, some modern, some historical. These stories make up the second part of the book. A man whose wife and child go missing on a Croatian island. A Dutch pioneer of anatomy who becomes obsessed by his own amputated leg. A woman in Moscow who walks out of her own life. Observations from the notebooks infiltrate the stories, so that the reader can glimpse the craft of the author’s architecture. As the book unfolds the recurring theme of the body begins to emerge. What’s revealed when we delve beneath the flesh?  What is a body, after all? Is the body in one place the same as the body in another? Tokarczuk’s restlessness fuels her writing. The book’s structure mirrors the subject of its enquiry, showing the arteries, intestines etc, which sustain the vital organs. Which lends the book a curious, occasionally frustrating brilliance, as we dip into one narrative only to be whisked on to the next. Which, one supposes, is also akin to the process of travelling. On the one hand a superficial occupation which means that you never get to know the place you’re visiting with any great degree of profundity; but also a means to enhance the horizons of the mind, to begin to be able to gauge the extent, variety and richness of this world we have been given to inhabit.