Flights takes readers through space and time

Olga Tokarczuk's novel Flights won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, the world's largest award for translation, which is what caused me to pick it up. It was translated Jennifer Croft, about whom I will be writing in another review. For now, I'm going to stick to Flights and its author.

Tokarcuzk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual who has been described in Poland as one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful authors of her generation. Flights won the Nike Award, Poland's top literary prize, in 2008. In 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. She trained as a psychologist at the University of Warsaw and has published a collection of poems, several novels, as well as other books with shorter prose works.  

According to my source—Wikipedia—Tokarcuzk is a leftist, a vegetarian, an atheist, and a feminist. She has been criticized by some groups in Poland as unpatriotic, anti-Christian, and a promoter of eco-terrorism. She has denied the allegations, and has described herself as a "true patriot." She said that groups criticizing her are xenophobic and damage Poland's international reputation.

In a New Yorker article ("Past Master: An experimental novelist and the battle for Poland's national narrative"), Ruth Franklin writes,  Tokarczuk's role, "as she sees it, is to force her readers to examine aspects of history – their own or their nation's – that they would rather avoid. She has become, she says, a 'psychotherapist of the past.'" Which brings us to Flights.

The 403 pages have no chapter breaks. Rather, subheads break up the text and change the subject: "Here I am," "The world in your head," "Your head in the world," "Syndrome," "Cabinet of curiosities," "Seeing is knowing," "Seven years of trips," "Guidance from Cioran". . . . 

The text after each subhead may be as short as a paragraph or a story several pages long. It may be written in first or third person. It may be a present-day observation in the present tense or an historical fiction written in the past tense. Or it may be genuine history; did Chopin's sister smuggled his heart back to Poland? It may be set in France or Poland or Germany or the Netherlands or Russia or Italy or on an island off the Croatian coast. It may be set in an airport. She has several meditations on and writes about incidents in airports. 

The text may be autobiographical: "I was as waitress, a maid in an upscale hotel, and a nanny. I sold books. I sold tickets. I was employed in a small theater for one season to work in wardrobe, making it through that long winter ensconced backstage amidst heavy costumes, satin capes, and wigs. Once I'd finished my studies, I worked as a teacher, as a rehab counselor, and—most recently—in a library. Whenever I managed to save any money, I would be on my way again."

The text may be creative non-fiction: The first thing that caught my eye upon arriving in the Eternal City was the beautiful black salesmen of handbags and wallets. I bought a little red coin purse, because my last one had been stolen in Stockholm. The second thing was the stalls laden with postcards—as a matter of fact, you could leave it at that, spending the rest of your time in the shade on the banks of the Tiber, perhaps having a glass of wine later on in one of the expensive little cafes."

The text may be fiction: "She's been packing for days. Her things lie in piles on the rug in their room. To get to the bed she steps between them, wading in among the stacks of shirts and underwear and balled-up socks, trousers folded neatly along the crease, and a couple of books for the road, the novels everyone's been talking about that she has not had time to read." (This story with its bland beginning is almost worth the price of the book. Fortunately, so are several others.)

One might read Flights as collection of stories only loosely connected to one another with themes that range—as I read them—from the unknowability of another person to the persistence of memory to the impact (in the sense of crash) of technology on human life.

The thread that ties all this diversity together of course is the author. Flights is Tokarczuk's cabinet of curiosities, stories, incidents, anecdotes she's collected in her travels and has put on display.  We readers are fortunate she has done so.