Olga Tokarczuk; trans. Jennifer Croft
Winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft, can very loosely be considered a novel. It consists of the unnamed narrator’s observations, social commentary, and philosophical reflections on a broad spectrum of topics sandwiched between a series of short, self-contained stories.
The narrator is constantly on the move, changing locations and modes of transportation, all the while observing people and places as she travels. Her interest in human anatomy takes her to museums and other locales where internal organs and external body parts are preserved in jars for all prosperity. She describes at length the various methods of embalming and holds a somewhat morbid fascination with scrutinizing dissected pieces of the human body. Her map of the human body is somehow analogous to the geographical maps appearing periodically throughout the novel, as if suggesting it is only through a detailed mapping of our bodies and our lands can we begin to grasp their meaning.
Her observations are interrupted with seemingly disconnected short stories. In one form or another, the stories deal with people taking flight. A mother and son mysteriously disappear for three days while on vacation. A woman answers a summons by a former lover she hasn’t seen in years to administer the injection to end his suffering. A seventeenth-century anatomist dissects his own severed limb before lapsing into his own private world. A mother spends several nights sleeping on the streets and in trains to avoid going home to her severely disabled son and her non-communicative husband. Chopin’s sister absconds with his heart to give it a proper burial in Poland.
The stories are fascinating, self-contained units. They capture fleeting and fragmentary moments in a life, a small part of a much larger whole. They give the impression of being frozen in time, dissected, and preserved—as if these bits and pieces of lives correspond to the bits and pieces of dissected body parts frozen in jars. The stories are punctuated with the narrator’s ongoing movements as she navigates from one hotel to the next, from one airport to the next, from one train station to the next. Movement and stasis feed off each other. The ephemeral and the permanent form two sides of the same coin.
The structure is complex, much like a patchwork quilt that loosely stitches together disparate pieces to form a whole. Tokarczuk pulls it off brilliantly. She keeps the reader guessing with a narrative alternating between fleeting images of a life frozen in time and the narrator’s constant mobility within which she pauses to observe and comment on body parts preserved in stasis. She leaves it up to the reader to tie the pieces together and to draw conclusions—if any are to be drawn.
A remarkable feat, innovative, original, thought-provoking, and highly recommended.