Publication
Fitzcarraldo Editions (2018), 432 pages
Original publication date
2007 (Pools)
2011 (Nederlands)
Collections
Genres
Awards
National Book Award (Finalist — Translated Literature — 2018)
Best Translated Book Award (Longlist — 2019)
Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (Longlist — 2018)
Nike Literary Award (Winner — 2008)
The International Booker Prize (Winner — 2018)
Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year (Fiction — 2018)
Boston Globe Best Book (Fiction — 2018)
Chicago Public Library Best of the Best: Adults (Selection — 2018)
Description
A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller's answer.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Niecierpek
This is an excellent Polish novel. It’s thoroughly modern and engaging and reflects the mobility and transience of our contemporary life. The frame for it is travelling, airports, different places around the globe- unnamed yet recognizable and sometimes as just nowhere in particular yet
There is no good translation of the title. Bieguni can be translated as runners, or it can be translated as pilgrims. The title is borrowed from the name of an Orthodox Christian sect whose members tried to avoid evil by moving about and changing places.
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everywhere at the same time. The structure is fragmentary- short, few page long snippets, images, fragments of narration of accidental meetings of fellow travellers, their stories, stories connected to particular places. The structure reflects the fragmentary nature of our experience, boundless curiosity pushing us forward to new places, seeking what? Immortality? Staying forever young? Better life? Or, is it just wanderlust? Difficult to tell. Also difficult to tell if it’s fiction or non-fiction, or what genre it is. There is no good translation of the title. Bieguni can be translated as runners, or it can be translated as pilgrims. The title is borrowed from the name of an Orthodox Christian sect whose members tried to avoid evil by moving about and changing places.
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LibraryThing member LukeS
Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft.
Motion! Keep moving - that’s the very explicit message in Flights, Olga Tokarczuk’s fascinating and highly praised 2007 novel. Stand still and The Man will co-opt you, pin you down like an insect in a case, and sentence you to servitude in hell. Keep
Flights consists of more than a hundred segments of widely varying lengths. The novel’s framework slowly becomes clear, and while only a few narrative threads recur to be updated, these are few and set out quite obliquely. Ms. Tokarczuk sets out for our consideration 17th Century practices in preserving corpses, with brilliant scenes of the busy anatomists’ operating room theaters. In an early thematic statement, the author asks, isn’t it wrong that we die? Shouldn’t we be able to preserve our bodies in perpetuity? The scenes set in 17th Century Holland bring us up close and personal to the first scientists to preserve flesh in any effective way. We return to this motif several times throughout the book, able to follow modernizations in technique along the way.
Other segments contain observations of various details and impressions of 21st Century travel: how people behave on planes; a certain universality of hotel rooms; a nervous note written on the bottom of an air sickness bag years ago; the design of airports. I don’t know if it’s actually the case in airports around the world, but in Flights, specialists - therapists and advanced students - give lectures in airport hallways about the psychology of travel. Mostly these lectures are only spottily attended or heeded - we and our author-guide are included in the crowd that doesn’t pay attention.
But: just past halfway through the narrative we meet Annushka, a disaffected housewife in Moscow. With a hopeless and restricting family life, she flees her predicament during her mother-in-law’s weekly visit. She takes to riding Moscow’s metro, finding a secluded corner to sleep in when the trains shut down for the night. A few days into this life, she encounters a mysterious woman, a vagrant clothed in multiple layers, even her face is hidden. She stands in a station hollering invective at whomever passes. Most of it is unintelligible, but Annushka eventually approaches her and, after spooking her at first, engages her in a halting conversation, fueled by the meals Annushka buys for her.
She learns the woman’s name is Galena, and Galena lives by the code of keeping moving. In her addled, outcast way, Galena serves as the Oracle of this story. At page 258 et seq, in a section called “What the Shrouded Runaway Was Saying,” the enterprising author spells out one main theme of the novel. In it we learn that the body in motion is holy and cannot be pinned down to an accounted-for, prefabricated, predestined life. If you keep moving, you will be saved from the inhuman government’s cataloging, its endless need for strict order and adherence, birth to the grave. A quote from this poetic exhortation:
“So go, away, walk, run, take flight, because the second you forget and stand still, his massive hands will seize you and turn you into a puppet, you’ll be enveloped in his breath, stinking of smoke and fumes and the big trash dumps outside town. He will turn your brightly colored soul into a tiny flat one, cut out of paper, of newspaper, and he will threaten you with fire, disease, and war, he will scare you so you lose your peace of mind and cease to sleep.”
We also read of a family whose arc exists in multiple segments, far apart in the book. While on vacation on the Adriatic, the man’s wife disappears with their small son for several days. This disappearance lasts a few days, but the man feels he cannot get a straight answer from his wife about it. He hounds her for months with his single-minded questions until finally she flies for good and takes her son with her. So, one cannot or should not become too literal in looking for reasons for flight. They are obvious and many, but sometimes unnamable. Whatever the reasons for the woman’s first sojourn away from her husband, eventually he drove her off permanently.
An unusual reading experience, this. We go along section by section, anticipating that a narrative will emerge, but we must content ourselves with a very slow and oblique unfolding. The main body of the story keeps us definitely in the present day: the rhythms and sights and smells and emotions of modern travel are all too familiar. Longer segments pop vividly up, with their more orthodox story lines, like advances in the preservation of human flesh, and two separate stories of women running from their homes and their oppressive family situations.
By and by, the images and the lessons gel into clarity: flight is sacred, natural, and necessary. The seeming randomness in the segments supports the thesis: the flesh of humans who have been preserved for display or exemplifies the pinning-down of people stationary in perpetuity. The more orthodox stories show people on the move for reasons of self-preservation, and the first-person narrator herself is constantly traveling around the world. It’s a wide-ranging novel, appropriately, and achieves its overarching thesis beautifully. Take it up and enjoy it. It’s unique, compelling, a deserving prize winner.
Motion! Keep moving - that’s the very explicit message in Flights, Olga Tokarczuk’s fascinating and highly praised 2007 novel. Stand still and The Man will co-opt you, pin you down like an insect in a case, and sentence you to servitude in hell. Keep
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moving and you have half a chance at wisdom, at beauty, at happiness. In 2018, this English translation won the Man Booker International Prize. The book deserves it, beyond doubt.Flights consists of more than a hundred segments of widely varying lengths. The novel’s framework slowly becomes clear, and while only a few narrative threads recur to be updated, these are few and set out quite obliquely. Ms. Tokarczuk sets out for our consideration 17th Century practices in preserving corpses, with brilliant scenes of the busy anatomists’ operating room theaters. In an early thematic statement, the author asks, isn’t it wrong that we die? Shouldn’t we be able to preserve our bodies in perpetuity? The scenes set in 17th Century Holland bring us up close and personal to the first scientists to preserve flesh in any effective way. We return to this motif several times throughout the book, able to follow modernizations in technique along the way.
Other segments contain observations of various details and impressions of 21st Century travel: how people behave on planes; a certain universality of hotel rooms; a nervous note written on the bottom of an air sickness bag years ago; the design of airports. I don’t know if it’s actually the case in airports around the world, but in Flights, specialists - therapists and advanced students - give lectures in airport hallways about the psychology of travel. Mostly these lectures are only spottily attended or heeded - we and our author-guide are included in the crowd that doesn’t pay attention.
But: just past halfway through the narrative we meet Annushka, a disaffected housewife in Moscow. With a hopeless and restricting family life, she flees her predicament during her mother-in-law’s weekly visit. She takes to riding Moscow’s metro, finding a secluded corner to sleep in when the trains shut down for the night. A few days into this life, she encounters a mysterious woman, a vagrant clothed in multiple layers, even her face is hidden. She stands in a station hollering invective at whomever passes. Most of it is unintelligible, but Annushka eventually approaches her and, after spooking her at first, engages her in a halting conversation, fueled by the meals Annushka buys for her.
She learns the woman’s name is Galena, and Galena lives by the code of keeping moving. In her addled, outcast way, Galena serves as the Oracle of this story. At page 258 et seq, in a section called “What the Shrouded Runaway Was Saying,” the enterprising author spells out one main theme of the novel. In it we learn that the body in motion is holy and cannot be pinned down to an accounted-for, prefabricated, predestined life. If you keep moving, you will be saved from the inhuman government’s cataloging, its endless need for strict order and adherence, birth to the grave. A quote from this poetic exhortation:
“So go, away, walk, run, take flight, because the second you forget and stand still, his massive hands will seize you and turn you into a puppet, you’ll be enveloped in his breath, stinking of smoke and fumes and the big trash dumps outside town. He will turn your brightly colored soul into a tiny flat one, cut out of paper, of newspaper, and he will threaten you with fire, disease, and war, he will scare you so you lose your peace of mind and cease to sleep.”
We also read of a family whose arc exists in multiple segments, far apart in the book. While on vacation on the Adriatic, the man’s wife disappears with their small son for several days. This disappearance lasts a few days, but the man feels he cannot get a straight answer from his wife about it. He hounds her for months with his single-minded questions until finally she flies for good and takes her son with her. So, one cannot or should not become too literal in looking for reasons for flight. They are obvious and many, but sometimes unnamable. Whatever the reasons for the woman’s first sojourn away from her husband, eventually he drove her off permanently.
An unusual reading experience, this. We go along section by section, anticipating that a narrative will emerge, but we must content ourselves with a very slow and oblique unfolding. The main body of the story keeps us definitely in the present day: the rhythms and sights and smells and emotions of modern travel are all too familiar. Longer segments pop vividly up, with their more orthodox story lines, like advances in the preservation of human flesh, and two separate stories of women running from their homes and their oppressive family situations.
By and by, the images and the lessons gel into clarity: flight is sacred, natural, and necessary. The seeming randomness in the segments supports the thesis: the flesh of humans who have been preserved for display or exemplifies the pinning-down of people stationary in perpetuity. The more orthodox stories show people on the move for reasons of self-preservation, and the first-person narrator herself is constantly traveling around the world. It’s a wide-ranging novel, appropriately, and achieves its overarching thesis beautifully. Take it up and enjoy it. It’s unique, compelling, a deserving prize winner.
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LibraryThing member Othemts
Flights is a collection of 116 vignettes, some of them exceedingly brief, while others are short stories. They all focus on a theme of travel and are narrated by a nameless woman who practices an old Orthodox Christian belief of constant movement to avoid evil. There's a lot of variety in the
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vignettes ranging from contemporary stories to historical fiction. In addition to the theme of travel, with a focus on travel psychology, there is also a reoccurrence of the theme of anatomy and dissection. This is a weird and wonderful book, although I did struggle mightily to keep up with the fragmentary narrative. Show Less
LibraryThing member BrokenTune
Flights (2007) by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk may have won the Booker Prize in 2018 but just felt like a never-ending book. Thankfully, it had an end after all.
It’s been a while since I met a book that felt so painfully slow, disjointed, uninteresting, and absolutely not my jam.
The odd thing
I guess the point of Flights was to show how everything, all the world is in transit or transition in some way, but the sheer number of different snippets of stories – there were no real stories in this book, at least none that had a beginning, middle and end – just made me loose interest very quickly in any of them.
Couple this with a style that, while very lyrical, was experimental to the point of just throwing out a lot of, not platitudes, but statements like they were supposed be universal truths without questioning them. I just could not find anything in this book that would engage, amuse, entertain, or even interest me at all.
It may be that the author tried too hard. It may be that the book just went over my head. Whatever.
The one unforgivable effect that this book had on me was it bored me stiff.
But at least I can count it towards my Around the World reading project.
It’s been a while since I met a book that felt so painfully slow, disjointed, uninteresting, and absolutely not my jam.
The odd thing
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is, that parts of the book felt like I should have loved it because those parts did remind me of the writing of Ali Smith … except that where Smith manages to be evocative, Tokarczuk sounded sarcastic to me.I guess the point of Flights was to show how everything, all the world is in transit or transition in some way, but the sheer number of different snippets of stories – there were no real stories in this book, at least none that had a beginning, middle and end – just made me loose interest very quickly in any of them.
Couple this with a style that, while very lyrical, was experimental to the point of just throwing out a lot of, not platitudes, but statements like they were supposed be universal truths without questioning them. I just could not find anything in this book that would engage, amuse, entertain, or even interest me at all.
It may be that the author tried too hard. It may be that the book just went over my head. Whatever.
The one unforgivable effect that this book had on me was it bored me stiff.
But at least I can count it towards my Around the World reading project.
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LibraryThing member sometimeunderwater
Can't remember the last time I was as disappointed in a book. I'd been looking forward to reading this since it won the 2018 Booker and Tokarczuk won the Nobel. All the reviews seemed to suggest it was squarely up my alley, and so I admit my expectations were higher than usual.
However I just don't
The main problem is that the majority of interludes are just overwhelmingly banal, and read like the shower thoughts of a gap-year traveller - desperately justifying their long holiday through surface-deep musings on the importance of moving. A few reviewers misused the word 'flaneur' in describing this - when that's what this book is precisely lacking: any spatially-specific depth, developed through proper engagement over time. It's an 'airport novel' in the worst sense.
I mean: "Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids". Good lord, pass me the beer.
The longer fictional elements which intersperse the text are better - and written in a frank, competent style. But as unresolved vignettes they are still trying to gesture towards a vague profundity which the book doesn't ever validate or justify.
However I just don't
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think this book succeeds at all. As a free-wheeling series of vignettes, hung on a central rubric (in this case 'motion/travel') it's outsmarted by writers like Sebald, who did this years ago and much better.The main problem is that the majority of interludes are just overwhelmingly banal, and read like the shower thoughts of a gap-year traveller - desperately justifying their long holiday through surface-deep musings on the importance of moving. A few reviewers misused the word 'flaneur' in describing this - when that's what this book is precisely lacking: any spatially-specific depth, developed through proper engagement over time. It's an 'airport novel' in the worst sense.
I mean: "Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids". Good lord, pass me the beer.
The longer fictional elements which intersperse the text are better - and written in a frank, competent style. But as unresolved vignettes they are still trying to gesture towards a vague profundity which the book doesn't ever validate or justify.
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LibraryThing member Okies
Listened to Part 1/11 only, but just didn't feel like this kind of first person narration. I can see it is clever, but where's the plot? The narrator, Julia Whelan, is also too familiar to me, too much associated with Tara Westover's Educated, which was so powerful her narration is not forgettable.
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Her voice suited that book - perhaps it suits this one too, but I'm too close to that other one, to accept the leap required. Show Less
LibraryThing member PaulDalton
Olga Tokarczuk describes Flights (original Polish title 'Bieguni', after a religious sect who believed that the only way to escape the power of the Antichrist was to avoid stability) as a 'constellation novel', in which a myriad of seemingly un- or only tangentially related stories, essays and
A magnificent novel.
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sketches are cast into orbit, allowing the reader’s imagination to form them into meaningful shapes. A magnificent novel.
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LibraryThing member MM_Jones
Once again I find myself bogged down in trying to makes sense of a nonlinear work of fiction. Perhaps this type of writing is the newest version of the "novel", but I find I gravitate to either facts or stories. The author says in an interview that she had all the bits & pieces on the floor and
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settled upon the perfect arrangement, all seemed rather random to me. Show Less
LibraryThing member ibkennedy
Some interesting stories, well written and some pretty boring, especially body preservatiuon items...too many!!!
LibraryThing member thorold
At first sight, this is an idea for a book so crazy that you are inclined to suspect that it could have been the result of a silly party game — after the third bottle of wine has gone round the writer gets her friends to write down things that could be subjects for a parody of the postmodern
...but of course that's unfair. Whatever the method that led her to pick these particular themes, Tokarczuk knows what she's doing, and she stitches them into a complex but very satisfying whole, using a mixture of first-person observation in the persona of the author, fragments of fictional stories, and historical anecdotes, illustrated in a pleasingly incoherent way by a selection of old and slightly offbeat maps of places that mostly don't have anything obvious to do with the text.
Some things work better than others: the whole flight=fugue, arrival=death, aircraft=womb (etc.) thing has been done by so many other people, and the last part of the book almost reads like a rehash of Tennyson's "Ulysses". But she does manage to keep our attention, even there, and she does a lot of unexpected things with the other major thread about anatomical exhibitions and tissue-preservation (parts of which are also quite well-trodden ground for postmodern writers). And she's simply such a good writer in detail as well: wherever we are in the book there are unexpected images and pieces of observation to make us go back and read a passage again, with even more pleasure than the first time.
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novel, and, suitably blindfolded, she draws out "air travel", "museums of anatomical specimens" and "old maps"......but of course that's unfair. Whatever the method that led her to pick these particular themes, Tokarczuk knows what she's doing, and she stitches them into a complex but very satisfying whole, using a mixture of first-person observation in the persona of the author, fragments of fictional stories, and historical anecdotes, illustrated in a pleasingly incoherent way by a selection of old and slightly offbeat maps of places that mostly don't have anything obvious to do with the text.
Some things work better than others: the whole flight=fugue, arrival=death, aircraft=womb (etc.) thing has been done by so many other people, and the last part of the book almost reads like a rehash of Tennyson's "Ulysses". But she does manage to keep our attention, even there, and she does a lot of unexpected things with the other major thread about anatomical exhibitions and tissue-preservation (parts of which are also quite well-trodden ground for postmodern writers). And she's simply such a good writer in detail as well: wherever we are in the book there are unexpected images and pieces of observation to make us go back and read a passage again, with even more pleasure than the first time.
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LibraryThing member sperzdechly
There are great moments in this book. Some are thought-provoking or made me marvel at an apt insight that the author is revealing. Some are written beautifully, with mouthful sentences, rich phrases, and the author's wordsmithing that played on my senses and imagination.
But there are also moments
I understand that themes play here a much larger role than a plot and the author even (indirectly) explains in the book why so many of the pieces are inconclusive, but for me personally there were too many set-ups with no enough payoffs to enjoy this book. I appreciate the artistry and the author's skillfulness, but I can't see myself reading this book again.
But there are also moments
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that made me say "yeah, whatever" and just turn the page without any enjoyment. In a typical book, one could justify dull moments if they make great moments happen. In this book, where there is no specific narrative and structure, it is hard to explain why they were included.I understand that themes play here a much larger role than a plot and the author even (indirectly) explains in the book why so many of the pieces are inconclusive, but for me personally there were too many set-ups with no enough payoffs to enjoy this book. I appreciate the artistry and the author's skillfulness, but I can't see myself reading this book again.
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LibraryThing member stillatim
A double review: 'House of Day, House of Night' and 'Flights.'
I finally got around to reading 'House of Day, House of Night' on a friend's recommendation, after reading Tokarczuk 'Flights,' which is somehow even better. I'm baffled as to why this kind of form hasn't made its way into
The center-piece to this book is the story of St. Uncumber (Wilgefortis in German), who repelled a rapey would-be fiance by assuming the face of Jesus, beard and all, and thus became the patron of all women in horrible relationships (until her cult was suppressed fifty odd years ago)--and, more importantly, Uncumber's hagiographer (I'm pretty sure Tokarczuk make him up). This tale was inspired by the narrator's trip to the local church, which featured a pamphlet life of the saint; much of the rest of the book details the relationship between our narrator and her neighbor, Marta, which veers between standard small town comedy and fairy-tale airiness. Usually I would roll my eyes at the latter, but here it works, because Tokarczuk presents it so modestly--no "look at me undermining paradigms!" stuff here.
Perhaps the gender-bending, localism and fairy-tale aspects will date this book in a few years; perhaps not. But it works wonderfully with the later 'Flights.' 'Flights' is tied together by the narrator's travels in the world of bodily preservation, which she refers to as her 'pilgrimages.' The narratives here are more resolutely contemporary: families go on holiday, only for disaster to strike, and so on. The past is just as important as it is in 'House,' but the stories are more--if this is the right word--mainstream. As a special bonus, there are fabulous illustrations.
While 'House' is about one place, about the immobility of history and God and so on, and how all that immobility relies on motion and change, 'Flights' is more or less the exact opposite: same form, with science (in the form plastination) taking the place of God (if not religion) and tourism taking the place of localism: it turns out that the ever changing world of the human body and tourism and love relies on some fixity, as well.
Intelligent, beautifully translated, endlessly interesting, and blessedly non-self-important, I can only hope these two novels exert some influence over writers outside of Poland as well as inside it.
I finally got around to reading 'House of Day, House of Night' on a friend's recommendation, after reading Tokarczuk 'Flights,' which is somehow even better. I'm baffled as to why this kind of form hasn't made its way into
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English-language writing, except in the most self-important and portentous way: a compendium of memoir (whether actual or purely formal), short stories, essays, research, tall tales, local history and so on, all of which is actually connected together in pretty obvious ways (here, by locality) rather than being aggressively meaningless, as in most fragmented anglo novels. The center-piece to this book is the story of St. Uncumber (Wilgefortis in German), who repelled a rapey would-be fiance by assuming the face of Jesus, beard and all, and thus became the patron of all women in horrible relationships (until her cult was suppressed fifty odd years ago)--and, more importantly, Uncumber's hagiographer (I'm pretty sure Tokarczuk make him up). This tale was inspired by the narrator's trip to the local church, which featured a pamphlet life of the saint; much of the rest of the book details the relationship between our narrator and her neighbor, Marta, which veers between standard small town comedy and fairy-tale airiness. Usually I would roll my eyes at the latter, but here it works, because Tokarczuk presents it so modestly--no "look at me undermining paradigms!" stuff here.
Perhaps the gender-bending, localism and fairy-tale aspects will date this book in a few years; perhaps not. But it works wonderfully with the later 'Flights.' 'Flights' is tied together by the narrator's travels in the world of bodily preservation, which she refers to as her 'pilgrimages.' The narratives here are more resolutely contemporary: families go on holiday, only for disaster to strike, and so on. The past is just as important as it is in 'House,' but the stories are more--if this is the right word--mainstream. As a special bonus, there are fabulous illustrations.
While 'House' is about one place, about the immobility of history and God and so on, and how all that immobility relies on motion and change, 'Flights' is more or less the exact opposite: same form, with science (in the form plastination) taking the place of God (if not religion) and tourism taking the place of localism: it turns out that the ever changing world of the human body and tourism and love relies on some fixity, as well.
Intelligent, beautifully translated, endlessly interesting, and blessedly non-self-important, I can only hope these two novels exert some influence over writers outside of Poland as well as inside it.
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LibraryThing member Castlelass
Series of loosely connected vignettes about traveling and the human body. There are few stories here. It is extremely fragmented. This structure will appeal to some readers and turn off others. I found myself wondering the point of it all. There are a few philosophical musings that are somewhat
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interesting, but taken as a whole, this is just not my type of book. I prefer a storyline with a cohesive flow. It probably will work better for readers who enjoy experimental fiction. Show Less
LibraryThing member Gypsy_Boy
And, finally, 400+ pages later, I have finished reading Flights. It took longer than I expected or, honestly, would have liked. It is a collection of more than 100 items—some only a few lines long, others taking 30 or more pages—that have two general themes: travel and human anatomy. Tokarczuk
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is fascinated by every possible aspect of travel, from the mundane details of packing to “travel psychology” and philosophy to one’s fellow passengers, to the actual experience of flying and hotel rooms. She is likewise interested in human anatomy, particularly in what she (or more precisely, her translator) calls plastination, the process whereby a human body (or its parts) is transformed into plastic. Perhaps you have seen these famous exhibits: human bodies where the blood (and/or the organs) have been “replaced” by colored plastic. Tokarczuk is enthralled by the subject and returns to it frequently. Some entries seem to be no more than idle thoughts on a topic; others could well have been abandoned novels. Indeed, several longer entries—especially the one on a famous (real) 17th century Flemish anatomist—are fascinating. Then there is the lengthy story about a Polish family vacationing in Croatia; part one ends on page 51 and part two begins on page 330. Or the story about the afterlife of Chopin’s heart. Or the letters from the daughter of a black servant of Emperor Francis of the Holy Roman Empire begging for the return of her father for burial. The empreror, you see, has taken the body of this servant after his death in 1796, stripped it of its skin, stuffed it, and placed it on display. (This is a true story—although the letters are presumably, Tokarczuk’s invention.) Or the sections entitled “Sanitary Pads.” Or “Belly Dance.” “Airports.” “Cleopatra.” You get the idea. Whatever caught her fancy. Toward the very end is a story of a retired professor where Tokarczuk makes (somewhat clumsy) use of a metaphor to tie the theme of travel to the theme of her interest in anatomy and the body. All in all, I found the book extraordinarily uneven; sometimes fascinating, sometimes unbearably tedious. Though I have to imagine that I am wrong, at times (many more than one), the book seemed more like the convenient gathering of unrelated scraps that could otherwise be of minimal value, stitched together into one somewhat cohesive volume. Make no mistake: Tokarczuk can be a compelling writer. The problem for me in the book was the distinction between her ability to do so and the frequency with which she did so. Some entries are very nearly silly and some downright riveting. The book bounces from greatness to self-indulgence and back, over and over. Show Less
Language
Original language
Polish
ISBN
1910695823 / 9781910695821