A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller's answer.
I'm not a fan of short story collections so I probably shouldn't have picked up this book, but I really enjoy Olga's writing. I could not tell you any of the plot of each story, it all felt quite random and I lost interest a lot.
I'm not a fan of short story collections so I probably shouldn't have picked up this book, but I really enjoy Olga's writing. I could not tell you any of the plot of each story, it all felt quite random and I lost interest a lot.
Flights didn't hit five star status for me until two thirds of the way through, so I gave it four. By the end though, I was completely captivated. I love her writing. The attention to detail is remarkable and the characters are exquisitely drawn. There is a playful quality to her very peculiar tales and I found them fascinating.
The book is a challenging read: a series of stories, many of them split and with shifting points of view, and a narrator that is unreliable at times, but not always. Playing with format appeals to me, as long as it is not over engineered or pretentious. Tokarczuk's exploration of form feels natural.
The toughest part of this novel for me was figuring out what she's saying to the reader. The ostensible theme is travel, but these are journeys unlike any other -- through both the inside and outside of bodies, …
Flights didn't hit five star status for me until two thirds of the way through, so I gave it four. By the end though, I was completely captivated. I love her writing. The attention to detail is remarkable and the characters are exquisitely drawn. There is a playful quality to her very peculiar tales and I found them fascinating.
The book is a challenging read: a series of stories, many of them split and with shifting points of view, and a narrator that is unreliable at times, but not always. Playing with format appeals to me, as long as it is not over engineered or pretentious. Tokarczuk's exploration of form feels natural.
The toughest part of this novel for me was figuring out what she's saying to the reader. The ostensible theme is travel, but these are journeys unlike any other -- through both the inside and outside of bodies, through harems and Chopin's heart, listening to travel psychology lecturers. She talks about motility vs. stasis, crossing borders, and I think what it means to be free. I'm uncertain about her fascination with cabinets of curiosities and their preserved body parts, but maybe it's related to navigating boundaries?
An unusual, brilliant perspective on why autocrats hate immigration that serves as a theme for travel in all of its manifestations, and possibly for the whole book:
"This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads--this is why they persecute the Gypsies and Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.
What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging; they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps, newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, election results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.
What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of bar codes, labeling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way, by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize readings of their own bar-coded poetry.
Some clever and provoking one-page essays on travel, death, and belonging mixed with longer stories... almost a good meditation on what is preserved from life to death, but never cohered for me.
Panopticon is a word that was not in my vocabulary before reading this intriguing collection of short stories and thoughts. I don't know why. It's a great word, and so relevant. I had also never heard of travel psychology. People travel for a variety of reasons, and perhaps those reasons do not become clear until they do travel. Perhaps getting away from it all is to get closer to oneself.
Though I found many of these pieces fascinating, there were some that left me feeling as if I were missing something (perhaps flights of fancy inserted here to illustrate human randomness). Overall, I seem to be missing the connection between the maps of places and all the information about mapping the human body. Both involve the quest to see everything, I suppose...
I enjoyed the piece called Chopin's Heart, another educational interlude. There is a short story told in …
Panopticon is a word that was not in my vocabulary before reading this intriguing collection of short stories and thoughts. I don't know why. It's a great word, and so relevant. I had also never heard of travel psychology. People travel for a variety of reasons, and perhaps those reasons do not become clear until they do travel. Perhaps getting away from it all is to get closer to oneself.
Though I found many of these pieces fascinating, there were some that left me feeling as if I were missing something (perhaps flights of fancy inserted here to illustrate human randomness). Overall, I seem to be missing the connection between the maps of places and all the information about mapping the human body. Both involve the quest to see everything, I suppose...
I enjoyed the piece called Chopin's Heart, another educational interlude. There is a short story told in two parts and separated in the book, Kunicki: Water (I & II) that I personally found thought-provoking. I was amused by Trains for Cowards, because I would love to do more of that sometime--and yes, I have met people who do it because they won't fly. The beautiful, sad letters written by Josefine Soliman are poignant and eye-opening. Near the end, there is a short essay called On the Origins of Species that is quite clever--and alarming. It's the plastic bag depicted as the most migratory of creations. (Personally, I try not to take any more of these from stores, but they seem to find their way into my home and environment by other means.)
This does not read like a novel at all. Sometimes, it reminded me of For the Time Being, by Annie Dillard. Both contemplate the human condition, though Dillard's book is much shorter.
I recommend this--just don't expect a novel. I admire the writing, insight, and quirkiness of some of the stories. In hindsight, I might have enjoyed this more if I'd read some of these flights in a different order, too.
Rather appropriately, I read this book whilst sitting in waiting rooms and flying to Kraków. It is not a normal novel. The plot, such as it is, is not very linear, there are chapters unrelated to the rest of the book (at least in terms of continuity) and we discover little about many of the characters. Netherlands, it does hang together, it does make you think and at least part of it seems to have been written specially for a biologist like myself. And I loved the maps.
