Name: Ned Summers 's review of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
Item: Flights
Rating: 5
Author: Ned Summers

Olga Tokarczuk

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2018 Flights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk's most ambitious to date. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death. In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin's heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw. In the present we have the trials of a wife accompanying her much older husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, and the harrowing story of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish on a holiday on a Croatian island. With her signature grace and insight, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind.

Flights

Ned Summers 

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE A visionary work of fiction by "A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald" (Annie Proulx) "A magnificent writer." — Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of Secondhand Time "A beautifully fragmented look at man's longing for permanence.... Ambitious and complex." — Washington Post From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller's answer.

There’s a reason she’s the goat!!! The sentence structure! The paragraph breaks! The detailed analysis of our bodies after death! I love you, Olga, and I will be forever yours.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

Heather Margaret

I started a new job and it's retail so holiday hours have been IN-SANE. I'll come back with reviews in a hot minute.

Will Vunderink

Definitely a disappointment, given its reputation. The fragmented narrative and its particular preoccupations—travel; the nature of time and memory; maps; scientific oddities—bring Sebald's novels to mind, but Flights has neither Sebald's emotional heft nor his understated approach to grand themes.

alina s

Fadi

لا يزعلوا منا جماعة المان بوكر ولا نوبل 

يخي والله ما فهمت هي الرواية 🥺 عجزت لاقي رابط بين صفحة وصفحة 
أو شخصية وأخرى.
سرد رهيب أتفق..بس بدون حبكة وبدون أي رسالة
بعض الفصول ممتعة مثل وقت هربت البطلة هي وابنها وصار زوجها يبحث عنها 
بس غير هيك ما لقيت أي معنى للسرد.
أو بجوز الترجمة العربية ظلمتها.

Lauren 

** spoiler alert **
           So This was a gift so I didn’t know anything about this and was not expecting the fragmented little pockets of thoughts. It kind of felt like looking at someones travel diary. I loved the little stories that ran through it. More like you were just peering in on their life rather then sitting down and listening to them. I found it super relaxing and soothing to read ? Although the anatomy bits were almost too descriptive in some parts lol

Liam Byrne 

There are certain books that, whilst you can admire the quality of the writing and the scope of the ideas presented, just don’t resonate with you. Tokarczuk is clearly a very gifted writer and I could understand why someone might absolutely love what she served up in ‘Flights’, but it never fully gripped me like some books do. It had its moments, but all too often it felt like a fragmented slog.

‘Flights’ is interesting in terms of its structure because it reads like a series of small extracts that occasionally give way to longer set pieces. Ostensibly, we follow the main protagonist in her journeys – hence the name ‘Flights’ – which then spark off into longer narratives away from the narrator that tend to explore ideas around movement or travel. There also is a consistent focus on the body, mainly explored through stories about the plastination or dissection of bodies. Outside of being interesting narratives that allow for some long form pieces to hold the book together as a whole, I’ll freely admit to not entirely getting the link.

When the book is good, it is very good. Some of the brief asides about travel and the world of airports in particular are humorous, shared moments of understanding between the author and the reader. Alongside this, some of the longer chapters present interesting slices of life. Particular favourites for me included a woman travelling to see a dying ex-partner, as well as an aging man who gives lectures on cruises as seen through the eyes of his wife, looking beyond to a future when he no longer is apart of it. 

Indeed, there is a fascination with life, aging and death that does occasionally engage, but the lack of cohesion hurts the narrative, if there indeed is one. It just seems to meander from place to place, artfully and stylishly I’m sure to some, but losing any sense of power in whatever message Tokarczuk was trying to convey – again, if there is one. Therein lies the problem: if I’m leaving a book and I’m left with a lot of ‘why?’ or ‘what?’ questions, most notably ‘why was this written?’ and ‘what was the point?’, it doesn’t bode well.

What carries this novel to an average rating rather than outright panning is that Tokarczuk is clearly a very skilled writer. I could only wish to have her ease and control of language, which feels adeptly translated into English by her translator. However, being a good writer and writing a good book are two very separate things, and this is ultimately where the disconnect comes for me.

Vanessa Au Yong

Not a novel. Snippets of many things, but everything is something.

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2018 Flights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk's most ambitious to date. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death. In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin's heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw. In the present we have the trials of a wife accompanying her much older husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, and the harrowing story of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish on a holiday on a Croatian island. With her signature grace and insight, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind.

Jade Flynn

This novel of modern day nomads is literary fiction on steroids. The writing alone certainly impressed me enough to want to continue reading Tokarczuk. Maybe a more befitting title would have been The Wanderers. These fleeting fragments, sometimes in depth explorations, explore the human psyche, travel, the human body and home, dazzle.

Sameer Vasta

I don't think I've ever read a book like this one, and now I want every book to be like this one. What a revelation in what you can do with the written word.

Nico J

Literary fiction, you're my muse and I'm a sucker. The more frustrating it is the more I hang on tighter; the more characters that are created and left behind like tatters, I want to go back and collect them. This isn't something easy to label and I don't know if "novel" is the right word; it probably isn't. It's a collection, a meditation, a receipt torn up into pieces that are all distantly, probably related with a red string throughout but not all the puzzle pieces fit together. It had some musings on the main character's personal culture; it felt flat and grey and relatable and maybe that's just the soft pining of wanting to be more connected to Polish ancestry. There's just something magical and pining and horizon-gazing about this whole collection that hits some pain points but also ends up being something I love. The dual-metaphor throughout of bodies as a physical thing, able to be taken apart, touched, preserved - juxtaposed with the things we feel in our bones, the stories behind our eyes that don't come out of our mouths, the ideas and emotions that don't have easy names. I loved this - it made me think and feel. I'd read it again. Here are some quotes!

Quotes

•	[Page 4] “Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that – in spite of all the risks involved – a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all of eternity.”

•	[Page 7] “That life is not for me. Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots. I’ve tried, a number of times, but my roots have always been shallow; the littlest breeze could always blow me right over […] My energy derives from movement – from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.”

•	[Page 18] "I’ve learned to write on trains and in hotels and waiting rooms. On the tray tables on planes. I take notes at lunch, under the table, or in the bathroom. I write in museum stairwells, in cafés, in the car on the shoulder of the motorway. I jot things down on scraps of paper, in notebooks, on postcards, on my other hand, on napkins, in the margins of books. "

•	[Page 19] "With the years, time has become my ally, as it does for every woman – I’ve become invisible, see-through. I am able to move around like a ghost, look over people’s shoulders, listen in on their arguments and watch them sleep with their heads on their backpacks or talking to themselves, unaware of my presence, moving just their lips, forming words that I will soon pronounce for them."

•	[Page 107]" Words won’t do justice to the harem’s labyrinth. So picture perhaps the cells of a honeycomb, the curved arrangements of intestines, the insides of a body, the canals of an ear; spirals, dead ends, appendixes, soft rounded tunnels that finish just here, at the entrance to a secret chamber."
 
•	[Page 274] "In her family they used to say that you always had to sit for a minute before heading off on any kind of trip – an old provincial Polish habit – but this little entrance has no place to sit on, no chair. So she stands there and sets her internal clock, her inner chronometer, so to speak, speaking cosmopolitan, that flesh-and-blood timer ticking dully to the rhythm of her human breath. And suddenly she collects herself, grabs the handle of her suitcase in her hand, like a 
child that got distracted, and she flings open the door. It’s time to go. So she gets going. "

•	[Page 300]" In the last few years she has realized that all you have to do to become invisible is be a woman of a certain age, without any outstanding features: it’s automatic. Not only invisible to men, but also to women, who no longer treat her as competition in anything. It is a new and surprising sensation, how people’s eyes just sort of float right over her face, her cheeks and her nose, not even skimming the surface."

•	[Page 309] “Ruth” – story - what a story told in a few words. 

•	[Page 347] "Kleenexes led a modest revolution, eliminating class differences. After using them once you just threw them away."

•	[Page 370] "It has to do instead with the presentiment men have at every moment of their lives, a foreboding adamantly hushed and hidden – that left to their own devices, in the dull, quiet company of passing time, they would atrophy faster. As though they’d been designed for a brief spurt of intensity, a high-stakes race, a triumph and, immediately afterward, exhaustion. That what kept them alive was excitement, a costly life strategy; energy reserves eventually ran out, and then life would be lived in overdraft. "

•	[Page 371] "She often reflected on how her life had turned out, and she was coming to the conclusion that the truth was simple: men needed women more than women needed men. In fact, thought Karen, women could get along perfectly fine without men altogether. They tolerated solitude well, took care of their health and cultivated friendships, last longer – as she tried to think of other qualities, she realized she was imaging women as a highly useful breed of dog."

Shreerag Plakazhi

If you asked me to describe Flights I would struggle. It's one of those books that you experience, even if the experience itself is more memorable than any specifics. I felt movement as I read this book. The writing is terrific, the stories don't have a beginning or an end as such, and are interspersed with facts (which are apparently not true). It's pretentious maybe but definitely worth the attempt for someone as in love with literature as I am.

James Smart

Reading this book is like visiting an art gallery. Every room filled with pieces you could dedicate your life to, but with Olga as tour guide, sheparding you gently forward & saying, Come, there is so much more to see.

It feels - sometimes - like literally everything, overwhelming and beautiful

Ned Summers &
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

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Flights by Olga Tokarczuk