Flights
Olga Tokarczuk (Trans., Jennifer Croft), 2018
Penguin Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525534204
Summary
Winner, 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature
Winner, 2018 Man Booker International Prize
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
- 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.. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 29, 1962
• Where—Sulechow, Poland
• Education—University of Warsaw
• Awards—Nobel Prize for Literature; Man Booker International Prize
• Currently—lives in Krajanow, Poland
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual, who has been described in Poland as one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful authors of her generation. All told, she has published a collection of poems, several novels, as well as other books with shorter prose works.
Noted for the mythical tone of her writing, Tokarczuk won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature for her "narrative imagination that, with encyclopedic passion, represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." In 2018 she won the Man Booker International Prize for her novel, Flights.
Tokarczuk was born in Sulechow, in western Poland (0ne of her grandmothers was from Ukraine). She trained as a psychologist at the University of Warsaw and, during her studies, volunteered in an asylum for adolescents with behavioural problems.
After graduation in 1985, Tokarczuk moved first to Wrocław and later to Wałbrzych, where she practiced as a therapist. Tokarczuk considers herself a disciple of Carl Jung and cites his psychology as an inspiration for her literary work. Since 1998, Tokarczuk has lived in a small village Krajanow near Nowa Ruda, from where she also manages her private publishing company Ruta.
A leftist, a vegetarian, and feminist, Tokarczuk has been criticized by some Polish groups as unpatriotic, anti-Christian, and a promoter of eco-terrorism. Denying the allegations and describing herself as a "true patriot," she turned the tables on her critics, labeling them as xenophobes who are damaging Poland's international reputation. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/13/2019 .)
Book Reviews
It’s a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons—the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy—we venture forth into the world.… In Jennifer Croft’s assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced.
New York Times
A beautifully fragmented look at man’s longing for permanence… ambitious and complex.
Washington Post
An unclassifiable medley of linked fictions and essays.… Reading it is like being a passenger on a long trip…. It’s amusing, exciting…. It moves… to moments of intense interest and beauty.
Wall Street Journal
Tokarczuk’s discerning eye shakes things up, in the same way that her book scrambles conventional forms…. Like her characters, our narrator is always on the move, and is always noticing and theorizing, often brilliantly.
New Yorker
A revelation…. Flights is a witty, imaginative, hard-to-classify work that is in the broadest sense about travel…. In this risky, restlessly mercurial book, Tokarczuk has found a way of turning… philosophy into writing that doesn't just take flight but soars.
NPR (Fresh Air)
What’s in a novel? This Man Booker International Prize winner reads like a rigorous response to that question in the best, most edifying (and maddening) way.… Flights has the scattered intimate quality of a personal diary, its magic wedded to its singularity. It’s an unexpected, funny journey into that most elusive of places—the human condition.
Entertainment Weekly
A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them. No two readers will experience it exactly the same way. Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited. Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it reflects, challenges, and rewards.
Los Angeles Review of Books
(Starred review) [A]n indisputable masterpiece…. Punctuated by maps and figures, the discursive novel is reminiscent of the work of [W.G.] Sebald. The threads ultimately converge in a remarkable way, making this an extraordinary accomplishment.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) This host of haunting narratives teases the mind and taunts the soul…. As a solution of severed threads, it relies on readers for assemblage, and the task is exhilarating indeed.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Characters are drawn to precision…. Tokarczuk’s tales vary in length and are complex and layered, forming an exploration into the impermanence of existence and experience.
Booklist
It’s not a novel exactly.… This is a series of fragments tenuously linked by the idea of travel—through space and also through time—and a thoughtful, ironic voice…. Tokarczuk has a sly sense of humor.… A welcome introduction to a major author.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for FLIGHTS … then take off on your own:
1. At the onset of Flights, the narrator tells us that "a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence." What is her reasoning; why does she make such a claim? Do you agree with her that journeys play a vital role in our lives?
2. (Follow-up to Question 1) The narrator recalls her childhood: her parents led an itinerant life, moving from place to place in their van, settling for only a year. Yet she concludes that the sedentary life is not for her:
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.… [M]y roots have always been shallow.… I don’t know how to germinate.
Having hardly led a stationary existence while growing up, what was it about her childhood that our narrator finds unfulfilling?
3. (Follow-up to Question 1) How does the narrator work her idea, that movement is nobler than stasis, into the overarching theme for the various stories/essays in Flights?
4. Flights is a compilation of stories and fragments featuring different characters—the whole of which barely seems to tie together. Can you make the case that the stories, etc. do create a whole—either narratively or thematically? Or is the book simply too discursive to be understandable or satisfying? At one point, half-way through, the narrator herself wonders if she is…
doing the right thing by telling stories? Wouldn’t it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture?
What are your thoughts?
5. Which of the short stories or essays or fragments most stand out for you… and why? Which do you find most engaging or intriguing?
6. In an interview, Tokarczuk has described her method of structuring Flights as one in which she "throws stories, essays and sketches into orbit, allowing the reader’s imagination to form them into meaningful shapes"? Were you able to see her work as a "meaningful" whole? Why or why not?
7. Perhaps Tokarczuk implies in her work that, as travelers, we learn about ourselves. Are you a devotee of traveling to distant realms? If so, in what way do you find traveling fulfilling? Have you learned something valuable about yourself, or about how you can best live in the world with others?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)