Flights
by Olga Tokarczuk
Summary
Flights has no single story to follow. Olga Tokarczuk builds the novel out of roughly a hundred fragments, some no longer than a paragraph, others running to thirty pages or more, narrated for the most part by an unnamed woman whose only constant trait is that she is always traveling, and Tokarczuk calls the resulting shape a constellation novel rather than a narrative with a beginning and an end. Two threads recur often enough to feel like the book's real spine even inside all that fragmentation. One follows the seventeenth century Flemish anatomist Philip Verheyen, who studies the Achilles tendon after his own leg is amputated, dissecting the severed limb and, by some accounts, keeping it near him for years afterward, treating his own body as an object of scientific inquiry even as he mourns it as a part of himself. The other follows Frédéric Chopin's sister, Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, smuggling her brother's heart out of Paris after his death and back to Warsaw, a literal transportation of a body part that becomes the book's clearest image for its own preoccupation, what gets preserved of a person and what gets left behind.
Around those threads, Tokarczuk scatters shorter meditations on airports, plastinated anatomical specimens on public display, pilgrimage, and the psychology of people who cannot stay still, treating constant motion as something closer to a spiritual discipline than a mere habit. The fragments rarely explain how they connect to one another, trusting the reader to notice the recurring preoccupations, bodies, preservation, borders, without the novel spelling the connections out directly.
Reading Flights means giving up on narrative momentum entirely and instead following a sensibility across dozens of unrelated scenes that turn out, cumulatively, to be circling the same handful of questions. It suits a reader who enjoys assembling meaning out of fragments rather than being handed it, and one with a genuine curiosity about anatomy, travel and the strange history of how bodies get preserved after death.
Historical Context & Significance
Flights, published in Polish in 2007 as Bieguni and in Jennifer Croft's English translation in 2017, won Poland's Nike Award in 2008 and then, in 2018, became the first Polish novel to win the Man Booker International Prize, splitting the fifty thousand pound award evenly between Tokarczuk and Croft under that prize's rules. The Nobel committee's citation for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life describes Flights as directly as any of Tokarczuk's other books.
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was not awarded on schedule. The Swedish Academy suspended it that year after the husband of a sitting member was accused of sexual assault and harassment by at least eighteen women and of leaking prize winners' names in advance; the Academy announced the 2018 and 2019 prizes together the following year, Tokarczuk's alongside Peter Handke's. Tokarczuk also drew sharp domestic criticism in Poland after saying publicly that the country had itself committed horrendous acts of colonization historically, a remark that drew condemnation from nationalist politicians even as Poland's own foreign minister congratulated her on the prize.