2019: Olga Tokarczuk: "Flights"

There’s the question of what a novel is. Not that that’s worth splitting hairs about. But you could say this isn’t one - that it's literature, just not a novel. Flights imparts a vision of the world - “Here is a way of viewing what it’s about, this thing we’re in.” Which certainly counts as literature. But not quite a story as such.

What we have is a dossier, a 400-page sheaf of reflections and anecdotes and serialized novelish hunks, on the theme of transit. A fantasia on travel. If it weren’t a good book you might think it’s a cynical promotional gimmick to get paperbacks into airport bookstores. But it is a good book, very - so extra points to Tokarczuk for accomplishing literature and a slick marketing plan in one stroke.

The fragments of fantasia come in small bits: a few grafs of dry observation, or intellectual satire, like the pop-up lectures she describes in airport lounges on the emerging discipline of Travel Psychology. The audiences for these lectures can't be bothered to stop and listen....

In this clip, Tokarczuk (Polish) attacks me personally (American). But it's an amusing attack, tantalizingly thoughtful. [ie, multilinguality is more than just "being cultured", and instead is a cognitive grounding for an expanded self.]

dot-dot-dot.

And there are the longer hunks of fantasia fragment. The man whose wife and small child vanish during a mere minute out of sight, on a roadside pee-break en route home from vacation. A woman traveling to see an old flame on his deathbed across the world, learning they have no real connection at all anymore. An anatomical artist obsessed with platicizing human remains*... whose story segues into the history of a 17th-century predecessor, a naturalist in Spinoza’s Netherlands whose collected human oddities were lost at sea on their way to the Tsar. A fading octogenarian classicist earning his supper with cruise-ship lectures on ancient Greece. What these story fragments are pointing toward is a cosmic irony of people working, through motion and transit, to shore up something enduring and persistent across time. With the expected results.

(A homeless madwoman speaks what may be the book’s most succinct self-summary: “So go, sway, walk, run, take flight, because the second you forget and stand still, his hands will seize you and turn you into just a puppet.” [ie, “he who rules the world… who reigns over all that is still and frozen, everything that’s passive and inert.”])


Since the book is all about travel, the top theme I unconsciously expected was wanderlust, a kerouakian passion for road adventure. There’s some of the obverse of that - castigation of people who stay put - but the book's excitement level is pretty subdued. There is a (should I call it Slavic?) patience, or 1000-mile-stare indifference.

Flights is like... looking into the well-fledged, well-edited travel notebook jots of 100 educated European holidaymakers. People whose reflections evince a quietly philosophizing bent - bending toward mortality. On our varied paths, we are all traveling to the same place.



*Errata: I noticed that the plasticizer examines a cat who’d been done up by a colleague. As some kind of joke, the embalmed cat is rigged to play Queen’s song “I Want to Live Forever”. Well. Queen has no such song. The song is, “Who Wants to Live Forever?”, a song which does not yearn toward immortality, but reckons with mortality, which is pretty much the opposite thing. Ok, whatever, right? But Tokarczuk’s error is an interesting irony inside an irony (inside an irony).

(12/11/2019)