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.)