A Book Review: Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
“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. I’ve tried a number of times, but my roots have always been shallow; the littlest breeze could blow me right over. I don’t know how to germinate. I’m simply not in possession of that vegetable capacity. I can’t extract nutrition from the ground. My energy derives from movement — from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.”
A series of philosophical musings, short stories, and illustrated maps caught between a number of longer essays, Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2018) is strange and full of trapdoors, a cabinet of curiosities and loose ends — exploring the oddness of modern travel, the airports, hotels, public transport and even guide books. Parts were illuminating, parts were educational, and all was stunningly well-translated. For much of it, though, I was already planning my next trip and vowing never to return.
Her narrator, the daughter of restless nomadic parents, is a perpetual traveler who appears in about a quarter of these stories, a lover of the eccentric, the damaged, defective, the illogical, all that is specific and non-uniform. Like Tokarczuk herself, this character is writing a travel book in bite-sized fragments, often based on overhead scraps of conversation — ageism at hostels, travel-size toiletries and sleeper trains are among her preoccupations. She marvels at how an entire holiday can be reduced to a memory or two, and she worries that describing a place destroys it. She muses that the places, landmarks and cities blur into one big colourful, unintelligible mess, however, you do remember the airport, who was sitting next to you on the plane or the overwhelming desire to arrive.
The richness and power of Flights lie in the characters and their journeys. The 116 fragmented, yet oddly conjoined stories reflect the feelings and thoughts of characters in a distant and, at times, clinically sharp way. The narrator, a character in and of herself, is fascinated with the idea of transit — airports, buses, planes — all states of being on the move — and how it affects the human psyche. She pens these observations in a manner that made me envious of her articulation. I was confused, and ultimately horrified by the story of Kunicki, a Polish businessman, whose wife and son disappear for unknown reasons while vacationing on a Croatian island. The story of a Russian woman, a mother in the most difficult position fathomable, who tries to relieve the pain of people who have nowhere to go, illicit such strong feelings of loneliness, it’s almost visceral.
How many of us say we like “people watching” as we sit in a coffee shop? Flights, with its shifting core, is the literary equivalent of people watching.
