“I was unable to concentrate and became for some time a sort of gargantuan ear that listened to murmurs and echoes and whispers, far-off voices that filtered through the walls. But I never became a real writer. Life always managed to elude me. I’d only ever find its tracks, the skin it sloughed off. By the time I had determined its location, it had already gone somewhere else. And all I’d find were signs that it had been there, like those scrawlings on the trunks of trees in parks that merely mark a person’s passing presence.”

Flights is a novel by award-winning Polish author, Olga Tokarczuk. It was first published in 2007 as Beiguni. It seems to be a collection of anecdotes, observations, essays, opinion pieces, half-told tales retold, letters, and snippets that seem often to bear little or no relation to surrounding pieces. The topics are as diverse as sleeping on trains, educational wrappers on sanitary pads, airports, travel-size packs and messages on airline sick bags. There’s a rant about guidebooks. There are twelve maps or drawings (often without annotation or explanation of any sort), some of which are related to the text, others apparently random.

Several stories are told (sometimes in parts) interspersed throughout the novel: Chopin’s heart in a jar makes a journey to Warsaw; an ex-pat Polish biologist travels back home to grant an old friend’s dying wish; a Polish tourist’s wife and young son go missing on a Croatian island, and eventually reappear, only to disappear again; an ex-whaler hijacks his own ferry; Some stories appear complete, others lack resolution. The fact that the tongue is the body’s most powerful muscle is reiterated at least three times.

Apparently the theme is modern-day nomads, although this is not obvious. There does seem to be a lot of time devoted to the preservation of dead bodies and organs: Josephine Soliman makes several pleas to the Emperor of Austria for the return of her father’s skinned and stuffed body, for burial; wax model museums of body parts; Frederik Ruysch’s collection of preserved organ samples does not reach its destination intact; Filip Verheyen’s amputated leg, all feature.

The translation by Jennifer Croft seems flawless, and some of the prose is beautiful, but perhaps the power, or something of the essence of Tokarczuk’s writing is lost in translation and frankly, some parts are rather tedious (travel psychology in particular), especially as they lack resolution. Tokarczuk’s own quote describes this novel rather well: “In my writing, life would turn into incomplete stories, dreamlike tales, would show up from afar in odd dislocated panoramas, or in cross sections – and so it would be almost impossible to reach any conclusions as to the whole.”
This unsolicited copy from Text Publishing for an unbiased review.