Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Flights sets out as a dissection of modern travel, and becomes a diagnosis of the ancient human compulsion to move about. It is a loose travelogue, a collection of stories, a notebook of thoughts on modern life and airports and the human body. Fragmented and far-reaching, there are many windows into many lives: a man searches for his wife and child on a tiny island in Croatia; we follow Chopin’s heart on a secret journey from Paris to Warsaw; the recent beachings of whales around the world leads briefly into thoughts of animal suicide; and the strange, unworldly spaces of airport lounges come and go as the people that populate Flights drift in and out of focus.

It’s a bold, ragged book, a novel pushing at the limits of the form. At one point the narrator declares there are only two guidebooks worth having: an eighteenth century Polish travelogue that says even men with canine heads are worthy of salvation, and Moby-Dick. These are not accidental references. Like classic travel books and Melville's masterpiece, Flights is full of oddities and digression, where facts and history and geography are interwoven with stories and analysis. Loosened from the bedrock of a continuous narrative, the book floats between fiction and non-fiction, story and essay. It’s no surprise that it won Poland’s biggest literary prize in 2008, and Jennifer Croft’s translation captures the energy and wit of a gifted European novelist. [Galen O'Hanlon]