Flights
Review of novel by Olga Tokarsczuk
This is one of the rare books that change how you look at the ordinary and helps you recognize the extraordinary around you.
It consists of short essays, interspersed with stories, that spill over to one another and interconnect in unexpected ways. Some of the essays make me think of The Art of Travel by Alain de Boton, and some of the fiction reminds me of Borges.
Here’s a sampling of passages that caught my eye:
“I dreamed of working on a boat like that when I grew up — or even better, of becoming one of those boats. It wasn’t a big river … a minor one … a kind of country vicountess at the court of the Amazon queen. But it was more than enough for me.” p 3
“… I realized that …. a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest, that change will always be a nobler thing and permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ask, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.” p. 4
“I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature.” p. 17
“I think there are a lot of people like me. Who aren’t around, who’ve disappeared. They show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigration officers stamp their passports, or when the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their keys.” p. 52
“Every moment is unique; no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favors risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. p. 53
“Description is akin to overuse — it destroys; the colors wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what’s been described begins to fade, to disappear. … Guidebooks have conclusively ruined the greater part of the planet; published in editions numbering in the millions, in many languages, they have debilitated place, pinning them down and naming them, blurring their contours.” p. 69
“… you have to step in between the words, into the unfathomable abysses between ideas. With every step we’ll slip and fall.” p. 73
“What will you see here? The very edge of the world, where time, reflected off the empty waterfront, turns around disappointed and heads toward land and pitilessly leaves this place to its perpetual enduring.” p. 83
“Each year more people are killed by kicks from donkeys than by plane crashes. If you wind up at the bottom of a well, you’ll be able to see the stars even during the day.” pp. 102–103
[about deserts and beaches] “What if they’re entirely made up of the posthumous essences of the bodies of enlightened beings? p. 167
“… we experience time and space in a manner that is primarily unconscious. These are not categories we could call objective, or external. Our sense of space results from our ability to move. Our sense of time, meanwhile, is due to being biological individuals undergoing distinct and changing states. Time is thus nothing other than the flow of changes.” p. 171
“… one becomes what one participates in. In other words, I am what I look at.” p. 173
“… the suspect nature of what we naively take to be reality.” p. 190
“The nocturnal brain is a Penelope unraveling the cloth of meaning diligently woven during the day.” p. 227
“… with age, memory starts to slowly open its holographic chams…” p. 289
“Children become people when they wriggle out of your arms and say ‘no.’” p. 349
“That smile of theirs holds — or so it strikes me — a kind of promise that perhaps we will b born anew now, this time in the right time and the right place.” p. 403
