Flights

Wandering Heights

Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, won the Man Booker International Prize earlier this year, for translated fiction. It is not strictly a novel, but an intertwined bunch of pieces and stories about travel.  Most of the book is set in airports, railway stations, hotels, cars on the road, and gives a dizzying feel of dislocation.

The book begins with a narrator who likes the idea constantly being on the move. She says, “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. . . My energy derives from movement — from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.”  

Interspersing the voice of this restless modern-day gypsy, are digressions like random observations about travelling, and stories of other travellers, the most disturbing being the one about a man whose wife and child go missing when they are on vacation. Tokarczuk whips up tension and suspense and then abandons this track for a bit, to look at other people and their experiences, none of which give the reader a sense of an ending.  These fragments of stories and observations range from the banal (sanitary pads!) to the macabre, and could be like things that happen to everybody when they travel, but don’t always come to a neat conclusion, because it is time to move on to a new place. Still, the narrator who does not like the idea of naming or describing experiences, says, “Do not leave any unexplained, unnarrated situations, any closed doors; kick them down with a curse, even the ones that lead to embarrassing and shameful hallways you would prefer to forget. Don’t be ashamed of any fall, of any sin. The narrated sin will be forgiven. The narrated life, saved.”

It may not be a book to be read at a go, but dipped into from time to time, to get a dose of humour, wisdom, curiosity and introspection.

Flights

By Olga Tokarczuk

Translated by Jennifer Croft

Publisher: Riverhead

Pages: 416