As advertised, it is not a traditional or conventional novel-perhaps not a novel at all. This is a fragmented, chaotic, and even careless book roughly organized around the topics of travel and anatomy. I’d like to have more to show for my time than I do.

While I don’t exactly regret reading it-which is something, I suppose, I was far less impressed with it than most. This is a book that demands a lot of mental work and, at slightly more than 400 pages, a considerable time investment. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. 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. 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. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration.

Flights book olga tokarczuk