Flights

(Paperback)

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Description

Flights is a series of imaginative and mesmerising meditations on travel in all its forms, not only the philosophy and meaning of travel, but also fascinating anecdotes that take us out of ourselves, and back to ourselves. Olga Tokarczuk brilliantly connects travel with spellbinding anecdotes about anatomy, about life and death, about the very nature of humankind. Thrilling characters and stories abound- the Russian sect who escape the devil by remaining constantly in motion; the anatomist Verheyen who writes letters to his amputated leg; the story of Chopin's heart as it makes its journey from Paris to Warsaw, stored in a tightly sealed jar beneath his sister's skirt; the quest of a Polish woman who emigrated to New Zealand as a teen but must now return in order to poison her terminally ill high-school sweethearta You will never read anything like this extraordinary, utterly original, mind-expanding book. Many consider Tokarczuk to be the most important Polish writer of her generation and Flights is one of those rare books that seems to conjure life itself out of the air.

Reviews

A magnificent writer. * Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 2015 *
One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century. * Economist *
A novel of intuitions as much as ideas, a cacophony of voices and stories seemingly unconnected across time and space, which meander between the profound and the facetious, the mysterious and the ordinary, and whose true register remains one of glorious ambiguityFlights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness, for the acceptance of fluidity, mobility, illusoriness. * Guardian *
A novel in essays, a world-exploration in words, asoaring journey across space and through time. * Nicolas Rothwell *
Tokarczuk examines questions of travel in our increasingly interconnected and fast-moving world...Trained as a psychologist, Tokarczuk is interested in what connects the human soul and body. It is a leitmotif that, despite the apparent lack of a single plot, tightly weaves the texts different strandsof fiction, memoir and essayinto a whole. * Spectator *
Reading Flights is like finally hearing from a weird old best friend you lost touch with years ago and assumed was gone forever because people that amazing and inventive just don't last. Wrongthey were off rediscovering the world on your behalf, just as Olga Tokarczuk does. -- Toby Litt, author of Hospital
I have always considered her a person of great literary abilities. With Flights I have my proof. This is one of the most important Polish books I have read for years. * Jerzy Sosnowski *
Tokarczuks peerless travel guide is actually a guide to living. Every word, observation, reflection and story embraces the importance of staying mobile in thought as much as in beingThis is as brilliant and life-affirming as literature gets. * Saturday Paper *
Tokarczuk has a quizzical and highly observant eye, seeking and recording, turning perversely towards the deformed, the monstrous and abject This all makes for excellent and entertaining reading as we are privy to scenes and descriptions from which our first reaction would be to turn away. * Otago Daily Times *
Clever with a dry wit and beautiful black and white maps throughout the book, which added to the feeling that reading it was like stepping into a museum. * Good Reading *
Flights is a fragmented, bursting-with-life novelA lively and strange collection of portraits of unrelated characters, all in transit, woven together by the narrators essayistic musings. * Australian *
Tokarczuk is one of Europes most daring and original writers, and this astonishing performance is her glittering, bravura entry in the literature of ideasFlights is a narrative to accompany ones lifeeach new reading reveals a further destination, another idea to excite and engage the imaginationFlights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited. Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it reflects, challenges, and rewards. * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Moving and profound. * LitHub *
Disarming and wonderfully encouraging...Crofts translation from Polish is light as a feather yet captures well the economy and depth of Tokarczuks deceptively simple style. A welcome reminder of how love drives out fear and also a worthy Man Booker International winner for 2018. * Millions Most Anticipated (This Month) *
Travel writing usually presents a linear narrativeas departures and returns easily correspond with beginnings and endings. But Tokarczuk complicates this. Her characters, like the books episodic structure, resist neat demarcations...As I neared the end ofFlights, I realised I had stopped searching for a moral in each of these stories. The book is like a map: including disparate parts not because they cause or connect to each other, but because their contours help clarify a wider, impersonal whole. In this way,Tokarczuk shows that even the loneliest traveler fits into a bigger scheme. * Bookforum *
Flights itself is a cabinet of curiosities, of moments, crumbs, fleeting configurations...The individual vignettes are themselves sculpted, and anchoring...Each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced. * New York Times *
Pinwheels from somber to wryly funny to frantic with ease, and the myriad tones work together to build a layered, thought-provoking textTokarkczuks writing is endlessly penetrating and revelatory. * Music and Literature *
Criminally goodthe sort of novel that in its subtle imbrication of fragmentary narratives feels reminiscent of a great story like Austerlitz but at the same time entirely new. * Best Books of 2018, LitHub *
Magnificently translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, Flights has the scattered intimate quality of a personal diary, its magic wedded to its singularity. Its an unexpected, funny journey into that most elusive of placesthe human condition. * Best Books of 2018, Entertainment Weekly *
'Tokarczuks stories encompass different epochs, locations, lengths, perspectives and tonal registersShe has an eye for the paradox of the encyclopedic project, which seeks at once to encompass a significant range of information and possibilities while also leaving room for expansion.' * Literary Hub *
A symphony of stories and fragments that ostensibly explores ideas of home and travel but really maps the anatomy of the heart and mind, this book triggers serious existential questions...Like Coetzee, [Tokarczuk] wears her intelligence lightly, but the soul-suffering is harder to conceal, and the cumulative effect is quietly devastating. * Mary Costello *
It will make you want to quit your job, shed your identity, get on a plane, get on another, stay moving and see everything of this world that you can. * Powells *

Author Bio

Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland's best and most beloved authors. In 2015 she received the Brueckepreis and the prestigious annual literary award from Poland's Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, as well as Poland's highest literary honor, the Nike, and the Nike Readers' Prize. Tokarczuk also received a Nike in 2009 for Flights. She is the author of eight novels and two short story collections, and has been translated into a dozen languages. Jennifer Croft is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa.