By Olga Tokarczuk (the author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead), this was first published in Polish in 2007. The English translation, by Jennifer Croft, appeared in 2017.

It's undeniably a sui generis novel. Tokarczuk gives us 116 fragments, some telling us stories of real or fictional people, some offering observations of the world (ranging from a couple of lines to several pages) as seen by the sharp eyes of our quirky narrator.

Eileen Battersby glosses their content like this: "[The fragments form a] rich sequence of anecdote, observation, wry aside, personal reflection, extended narrative, and intense speculation about the shape of our world and its future."

In an interview with Claire Armitstead, Tokarczuk explained that, "just as the ancients looked at stars in the sky and found ways to group them and then to relate them to the shapes of creatures or figures, so what she calls her 'constellation novels' throw stories, essays and sketches into orbit, allowing the reader’s imagination to form them into meaningful shapes".

But it takes a bit of getting used to (unusually, I read a paper version, passed on to me by a friend who is an omnivorous and multilingual reader, and had loved Drive Your Plow, but who just did not warm to this book at all...).


Reading Flights in Newark

I was about to say that the format reminded me of a mosaic. But that would imply too much order. Maybe a kaleidoscope would offer a better analogy, given the way things shift and fall into place and shift again.

Ariel Saramandi reminds us that the fragmentary form was used by romantics and modernists "as an exemplar of the broken and divided self". Certainly, an undertow of sadness -- brave sadness, often, but sadness nonetheless -- permeates many of the stories and observations.


All the other pictures are from Qatar

James Wood argues that the book's two overriding themes are mobility and curiosity: "Like her characters, our narrator is always on the move, and is always noticing and theorizing, often brilliantly."

The mobility theme resonates enormously with me, of course... In fact, Flights reminded me very much of the mobilities theory I sometimes drew on in my International Relations work.

Very early on, our unnamed narrator tells us, "I realized that -- in spite of all the risks involved -- a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity... Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots." Later, she adds: "Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness -- these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized. Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids." And again: "It is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement."



This sounds celebratory. But then Tokarczuk constantly complicates her panegyric -- exactly as mobilities theory does. We encounter many travellers, many eras, and many purposes in her text. But, as I said, there is very often a melancholy beneath the journeys: A ferry captain turns his boatload of passengers towards the high seas; a woman journeys half-way across the globe to help a former boyfriend end his life; a woman and child go AWOL on an island holiday, leaving the husband and father in a despair from which their ultimate return cannot extract him; Chopin's sister smuggles her dead brother's heart back to Poland; an elderly lecturer, his mind starting to go, dies aboard the cruise ship on which he is paid to provide enlightenment; an uber-creepy doctor travels to obtain the secrets of Professor Mole, a dead rival, but meets his match in Mole's predatory widow; a Russian woman cannot cope any longer with looking after her ailing son and her war-traumatized husband, but her escape takes her only as far as a strange, "shrouded" woman, and endless rides on the Moscow metro.



The Polish title of Flights is Bieguni, a word that means "runners", and refers to an 18th-century Russian sect, whose members believed that the only way to defeat Satan was to keep moving. Tokarczuk apparently met some contemporary survivors of this sect, who spend their days travelling the Moscow underground...

So the shrouded woman is one of the "bieguni". And that word makes for a much better title (despite the inbuilt ambiguity of the word "flights"), because the fragment entitled "What the shrouded runaway was saying" effectively contains the book's manifesto:

"Sway, go on, move. That’s the only way to get away from him. He who rules the world has no power over movement and knows that our body in motion is holy, and only then can you escape him, once you’ve taken off. He reigns over all that is still and frozen, everything that’s passive and inert... Flee, get out of your homes, go, run away, for only thus will you avoid the traps of the Antichrist... For anything that has a stable place in this world -- every country, church, every human government, everything that has preserved a form in this hell -- is at his command... Whoever pauses will be petrified... 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 the 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... Move. Get going. Blessed is he who leaves..."

Powerful stuff. I recognize this drive, and this anguish, very clearly.



But I don't agree with Wood that Tokarczuk is promoting a "binarism [that] sounds too close to easy campus wisdom, to postmodern piety, even to neoliberal commerce: leaving is good, staying is bad; deracination is expansive, rootedness is dangerous". Rather, I think Tokarczuk evenhandedly celebrates and problematizes mobility.

In what ways, apart from the aforementioned note of melancholy that runs through so many of her travellers' experiences?

-- Her narrator is also clearly aware of our human limitations. If you are a traveller, you will ALWAYS be unfulfilled, because -- however rich you are, and however long you live -- you can never see everything: "There's too much in the world... We have no choice now but to learn how to endlessly select. Learn how to be like a fellow traveller I once met on a night train who told me that every so often he goes back to the Louvre just to see the one painting he considers to be worthwhile, of John the Baptist."



-- The narrator, too, admits that the chronicles of her travels are actually the chronicles of an "ailment". She is drawn to the flawed and defective, the bizarre and freakish, and it is this quest that drives her wanderings. Which doesn't sound nearly so ra-ra...

-- Armitstead explains how Tokarczuk's own travels began as a response to a crisis, when she decided she needed to take time out. Yes, travel-as-rescue is positive. But it's a "driven" form of travel. Battersby: "Tokarczuk sees the traveler as an individual on a quest for understanding and true experience, perhaps the ultimate in existence, but also potentially driven by the desire to evade reality, elude the inevitable."

-- And it's all relative. One of the travel psychologists the narrator encounters at an airport contends: "In essence, one becomes what one participates in. In other words, I am what I look at. And this was of course the reason behind the ancient pilgrimages." But we all know that you can travel while participating only in the familiar -- travel, but look only at the tat designed for tourists...

-- Finally, Wood himself points out that the sections reflecting Tokarczuk's Polishness are among the most moving in the book. As he admits, these episodes, with their distinctive local colour, "deliberately complicate the book's exaltation of mobility and its freedoms".

So this theme is quite fine-grained, I think.



The other theme that Wood isolates is curiosity. Which tends to revolve around bodies -- "the fragile bodies that carry us on our journey from life to death", as John Powers puts it -- and, more particularly, the preservation of these bodies... For Adam Mars-Jones, "Flights takes an obsessive interest in the preservation of bodies after death. The freedom or compulsion to roam comes up against the finitude of the body, and the posthumous processing, whether mummifying, pickling or plastination, that is both a denial of mortality and a capitulation to it. These two themes aren’t like subject and countersubject, since it would be hard to assign either of them primacy. They’re more like the poles of a single magnet, disposing material around them in symmetrical charged curves."

Truly, all sorts of eccentric and esoteric knowledge finds expression in these pages as part of this theme... The narrator tells us that she admires Moby Dick, a book written out of "a genuine desire to portray the world". And her approach, says Wood, resembles Melville's in its "encyclopedic and multiform" style. It "is a work both modish and antique, apparently postmodern in emphasis but fed by the exploratory energies of the Renaissance".

The bodies theme didn't resonate with me in the way the travel element did (although it was morbidly intriguing, and I admired some of the descriptions: "There can be no doubt -- the organs are packed painstakingly inside the body, preparations for a major journey").



What else? Well, in Flights you can definitely hear the voice that later became Drive Your Plow... Aleksandra, for example (the woman at Stockholm airport), was collecting evidence ("she had even gotten a grant for it from the European Union..."). The world seems diverse, Aleksandra says, "But don’t let yourself be taken in by the diversity -- it’s superficial... It’s all smoke and mirrors. In reality, everywhere is the same. In terms of animals. In terms of how we interact with animals." She goes on to list example after example of human cruelty. Later, Annushka sees tractors as "infernal machines towing sharp-toothed instruments of torture that deal the earth never-healing wounds".

But there are reminders of so many other things. This is surely what confirms that a book is worth reading, even if it doesn't come easily, and demands effort. The narrator's fascination with "cabinets of curiosities, where collections are comprised of the rare, the unique, the bizarre, the freakish", reminded me of Orhan Pamuk. The whole book recalled Montaigne (the insatiable curiosity, the conviction that existence is perennial movement...). I'm hesitant to comment on Nietzsche, as I haven't yet finished the fictionalized biography I'm currently reading, but I'm reminded of his views when the narrator talks about studying psychology: "We began to understand that if it weren’t for rationalization, sublimation, denial -- all the little tricks we let ourselves perform -- if instead we simply saw the world as it was, with nothing to protect us, honestly and courageously, it would break our hearts." (Nietzsche, I believe, would think that was good for us.)



And then, reading the thought-provoking commentary the book elicits, I get even more ideas: Must read more Herman Melville, and Rainer Maria Rilke; and reviewers detect affinities with W.G. Sebald, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Mathias Enard, none of whom I know at all.

Kapka Kassabova (read her too), while acknowledging that "Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own", maintains that Flights echoes Dubravka Ugresic (I have just one brief experience here), Danilo Kis (don't know at all), and Milan Kundera.

Kundera. Again just one brief fling. And a long time ago... On Wednesday 1 January 1992, I decided to keep a diary. I'd just finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being -- which, apparently, everyone else read in the 1980s... -- and in my very first diary entry, I wrote out (longhand) a quote that had struck me (I read it in French, so this is my translation): "There is no way to verify which decision is the right one, because there is no way of comparing. We experience everything immediately, for the first time, and without preparation. As if an actor were to walk out on stage without ever having rehearsed. But what can life be worth, if the first rehearsal for life is already life itself? That's why life always looks like a sketch. But even 'sketch' is not the right word, because a sketch is always the sketch of something, the preparation for a picture, while the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, a sketch without a picture. Tomas repeats the German proverb to himself: 'einmal ist keinmal', once does not count, once is never. Being able to live only one life is like not living at all."

Flights -- always balancing on the brink of something -- definitely reflects the ephemeral nature of a bewildered humanity.