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.

Move. Get going. Blessed is he who leaves."