{"id":23927,"date":"2018-05-02T18:10:48","date_gmt":"2018-05-02T22:10:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=23927"},"modified":"2018-05-18T00:47:40","modified_gmt":"2018-05-18T04:47:40","slug":"olga-tokarczuk-flights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2018\/05\/02\/olga-tokarczuk-flights\/","title":{"rendered":"Olga Tokarczuk: Flights<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/span><\/div>

Flights<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Olga Tokarczuk (2007)<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft (2017)<\/span>
\nFitzcarraldo Editions (2017)<\/span>
\n424 pp<\/span><\/p><\/h3><\/div>

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Throughout this beautiful chaos, threads of meaning spread in all directions, networks of strange logic.<\/span><\/p>\n

…
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His eyes attentively probe their constellations, positionings, the directions they point in, the shapes they make.<\/span>
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F<\/span>lights<\/em>, published by perhaps the UK\u2019s finest publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and seamlessly translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft (who translates from Argentinian Spanish as well as Polish), is the first Olga Tokarczuk novel I have read, but it certainly won\u2019t be the last.
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The Polish original was entitled Bieguni<\/em>, after a peculiar (possibly apocryphal) sect who believed that the only way to escape the power of the Antichrist was to avoid stability, “anything that has a stable place in this world — every country, church, every human government, everything that has a preserved form in this hell — is at his command . . . 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\u2019ve taken off.”\u00a0The English edition has chosen the more generic title Flights<\/em> (also taken from one of the many different pieces that comprise the novel).
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Both speak to the theme of the novel: travel, and the necessity for some of always being in motion rather than at rest. As a young child the narrator finds her way to the Oder river:
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The first trip I ever took was across the fields, on foot. It took them a long time to notice I was gone, which meant I was able to make it quite some distance. I covered the whole park and even — going down dirt roads, through the corn and the damp meadows teeming with cowslip flowers, sectioned into squares by ditches — reached the river. Though of course the river was ubiquitous in that valley, soaking up under the ground cover and lapping at the field.
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And she soon realised, that unlike her parents, with their settled life in one place,\u00a0that life is not for me. 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. I\u2019ve tried, a number of times, but my roots have always been shallow; the littlest breeze could always blow me right over. I don\u2019t know how to germinate, I\u2019m simply not in possession of that vegetable capacity. I can\u2019t extract nutrition from the ground, I am the anti-Antaeus. My energy derives from movement — from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains\u2019 and ferries\u2019 rocking.<\/span>
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The novel that unfolds is not told in linear fashion but, rather like the narrator\u2019s life, is told in fragments, details of her own travels intercut with observations on the psychology of travel and stories of travelers down the ages:
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Am I doing the right thing telling stories? Wouldn\u2019t it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not be means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single thought gets clarified, and then others racked after onto it in the succeeding paragraphs? I could use quotes and footnotes. I could in the order of points or chapters reap the consequences of demonstrating step by step what it is I mean . . .
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Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is never possible to fully control. They require people like me — insecure, indecisive, easily led astray. Naive.
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And as she observes of her writing career, she\u00a0became 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\u2019d 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\u2019d find were signs that it had been there, like those scrawl\u00adings on the trunks of trees in parks that merely mark a person\u2019s passing presence. 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.<\/span>
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Many of the pieces that form the novel are short (e.g.<\/em>, a page) and largely stand alone. For example, \u201cThe Tongue is the Strongest Muscle\u201d pities the fate of monolingual native English speakers:<\/span><\/p>\n

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How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lyrics of the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures — even the buttons in the lift! — are in their private language . . . Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them — they are accessible to everyone and everything!<\/span>
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Tokarczuk refers to her technique with the shorter pieces as “constellation,” letting the reader draw their own lines and form their own picture, and for me there were a number of main threads that emerged, notably:
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