Flights - Wyrms.de

416 pages

English language

Published May 14, 2019

ISBN:: 978-0-525-53420-4

(1 review)

Flights is a 2007 fragmentary novel by the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. It was originally published in Polish as Bieguni. The book was translated into English by Jennifer Croft. The original Polish title refers to runaways (runners, bieguni), a sect of Old Believers, who believe that being in constant motion is a trick to avoid evil.Set between the 17th and 21st centuries, the novel is a "philosophical rumination on modern-day travel". It is structured as a series of vignettes, some fictional, and some based on fact – among them that of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen's discovery of the achilles tendon, and the story of Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, the sister of the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, transporting his heart back to Warsaw.The novel won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, marking the first time a Polish author received the award. The chair of the judging panel, Lisa Appignanesi, described Tokarczuk …

Flights is a 2007 fragmentary novel by the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. It was originally published in Polish as Bieguni. The book was translated into English by Jennifer Croft. The original Polish title refers to runaways (runners, bieguni), a sect of Old Believers, who believe that being in constant motion is a trick to avoid evil.Set between the 17th and 21st centuries, the novel is a "philosophical rumination on modern-day travel". It is structured as a series of vignettes, some fictional, and some based on fact – among them that of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen's discovery of the achilles tendon, and the story of Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, the sister of the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, transporting his heart back to Warsaw.The novel won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, marking the first time a Polish author received the award. The chair of the judging panel, Lisa Appignanesi, described Tokarczuk as a "writer of wonderful wit, imagination, and literary panache". Tokarczuk and Croft shared the £50,000 prize.

7 editions

Fionnáin reviewed Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

A story from the perspective of travel

5 stars

Flights is a story where the protagonist seems to be travel itself. Billed as a novel, the book is split into many short chapters, some only a paragraph long, some many pages. Each chapter visits a specific moment of travel, or some part of the books other linked themes: preservation of bodies, colonialism and hierarchy, or disconnection and disregard of women.

I adore Olga Tokarczuk's writing. Her understanding of the craft and her breadth of imagination are a wonder, and her worldview is so respectfully and carefully entangled in her books that she is one of very few authors I read who can open new worlds in her works. So many moments of this book will stay with me. She builds worlds in moments and then discards them just as rapidly, as if all the stories were constructed out the window of an airplane leaving the runway. Her observations on …

Flights is a story where the protagonist seems to be travel itself. Billed as a novel, the book is split into many short chapters, some only a paragraph long, some many pages. Each chapter visits a specific moment of travel, or some part of the books other linked themes: preservation of bodies, colonialism and hierarchy, or disconnection and disregard of women.

I adore Olga Tokarczuk's writing. Her understanding of the craft and her breadth of imagination are a wonder, and her worldview is so respectfully and carefully entangled in her books that she is one of very few authors I read who can open new worlds in her works. So many moments of this book will stay with me. She builds worlds in moments and then discards them just as rapidly, as if all the stories were constructed out the window of an airplane leaving the runway. Her observations on travel feel like a post-air-travel epithet, recording for future generations what it was once like to fly in airplanes around a world that came to feel so small.

The book is a marvel for all of its small moments and its clever way of putting travel at the centre of a story. At times I felt it a little jarring to leap from one story to the next, although that is clearly the intention of a book written in such an experimental format. On the whole, this is another masterpiece by one of the best living authors in the world.