Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft (Translator)

Overview

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
 
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

A visionary work of fiction by "A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald" (Annie Proulx)

"A magnificent writer." — Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of Secondhand Time

"A beautifully fragmented look at man's longing for permanence.... Ambitious and complex." — Washington Post

From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525534198
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/14/2018
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	185,327
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland's most celebrated and beloved authors, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize, as well as her country's highest literary honor, the Nike. She is the author of eight novels and two short story collections, and has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Read an Excerpt

Here I Am
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Flights"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Olga Tokarczuk.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

It's a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons—the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy—we venture forth into the world…Flights is a cabinet of curiosities, of "moments, crumbs, fleeting configurations." The book is transhistorical, transnational; it leaps back and forth through time, across fiction and fact. Interspersed with the narrator's journey is a constellation of discrete stories that share rhyming motifs and certain turns of phrase. These vignettes often have the flavor of case studies, with interlocking themes related to the brittleness of the body and the complicated work of mourning…As plots ramify and the cast grows, the individual vignettes are themselves sculpted, and anchoring. In Jennifer Croft's assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced. And Tokarczuk has a canny knack for reading the reader, for anticipating your criticisms.

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

★ 05/28/2018
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize, this novel from Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night) is an indisputable masterpiece of "controlled psychosis," as one of the characters phrases it. Written in a cacophony of voices, the book's themes accumulate not from plot, but rather associations and resonances. It begins in Croatia, where a tourist, Kunicki, is lazily smoking cigarettes beside his car in an island olive grove, waiting for his wife and son to return from a short walk. Except they don't, and Kunicki must frantically search for his lost family in a sun-drenched paradise, 10 kilometers in diameter. The novel then, after some number of pages and disjointed narratives, joins the peculiar anatomist Dr. Blau's journey to the seaside village home of a recently deceased rival. This prompts the retelling of the sad, true tale of Angelo Soliman, born in Nigeria, who had lived as a dignified and respected Viennese courtier, only to be mummified and displayed by Francis I as a racial specimen "wearing only a grass band." This rumination on anatomy brings into the text the anatomist Philip Verheyen, born in 1648 in Flanders, who keeps his amputated leg, preserved in alcohol, on the headboard of his bed. The novel continues in this vein—dipping in and out of submerged stories, truths, and flights of fantasy stitched together by associations. Punctuated by maps and figures, the discursive novel is reminiscent of the work of Sebald. The threads ultimately converge in a remarkable way, making this an extraordinary accomplishment. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

2018-05-15
Thoughts on travel as an existential adventure from one of Poland's most lauded and popular authors.Already a huge commercial and critical success in her native country, Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night, 2003) captured the attention of Anglophone readers when this book was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. In addition to being a fiction writer, Tokarczuk is also an essayist and a psychologist and an activist known—and sometimes reviled—for her cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist views. Her wide-ranging interests are evident in this volume. It's not a novel exactly. It's not even a collection of intertwined short stories, although there are longer sections featuring recurring characters and well-developed narratives. Overall, though, this is a series of fragments tenuously linked by the idea of travel—through space and also through time—and a thoughtful, ironic voice. Movement from one place to another, from one thought to another, defines both the preoccupations of this discursive text and its style. One of the extended stories follows a man named Kunicki whose wife and child disappear on vacation—and suddenly reappear. A first-person narrator offers a sort of memoir through movement, recalling her own peregrinations bit by bit. There are pilgrims and holidaymakers. Tokarczuk also explores the connection between travel and colonialism with side trips into "exotic" practices and cabinets of curiosity. There are philosophical digressions, like a meditation on the flight from Irkutsk to Moscow that lands at the same time it takes off. None of this is to say that this book is dry or didactic. Tokarczuk has a sly sense of humor. It's impossible not to laugh at the opening line, "I'm reminded of something that Borges was once reminded of…." Of course someone interested in maps and territories, of the emotional landscape of travel and the difference between memory and reality would feel an affinity for the Argentine fabulist.A welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature.

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Flights:

"What’s in a novel? This Man Booker International Prize winner reads like a rigorous response to that question in the best, most edifying (and maddening) way…Magnificently translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, Flights has the scattered intimate quality of a personal diary, its magic wedded to its singularity. It’s an unexpected, funny journey into that most elusive of places — the human condition." –Entertainment Weekly

“A revelation … Flights is a witty, imaginative, hard-to-classify work that is in the broadest sense about travel…. In this risky, restlessly mercurial book, Tokarczuk has found a way of turning…philosophy into writing that doesn't just take flight but soars.” – NPR’s “Fresh Air”
 
“A beautifully fragmented look at man’s longing for permanence … ambitious and complex.” —Washington Post

“It’s a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons — the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy — we venture forth into the world …In Jennifer Croft’s assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced.” —The New York Times
 
“A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.” –Annie Proulx

“Tokarczuk’s discerning eye shakes things up, in the same way that her book scrambles conventional forms... Like her characters, our narrator is always on the move, and is always noticing and theorizing, often brilliantly.” —The New Yorker 

“There's no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times.” —The Guardian 
 
“Dive in beyond physical place to the mind of the traveler in this experimental collection of interwoven stories, essays, and musings as delightfully meandering as wanderlust itself.” –Fodor’s Travels
 
“Flights works like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.”—Marlon James

“This hypnotizing new novel about travel, movement, and the complexities of distance deserves a place on every bookshelf.” —Southern Living 
 
“Provides food for thought about what makes us move and what makes us tick.… Travel may broaden the mind, but this travel-themed book stimulates it.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune 

“Take the time to settle into this unconventional narrative that is by turns startling, moving and profound.” –Dallas Morning News
 
“An unclassifiable medley of linked fictions and essays.… Reading it is like being a passenger on a long trip.... It’s amusing, exciting.... It moves... to moments of intense interest and beauty.” —Wall Street Journal
 
“A disorienting, intelligent, and unforgettable book.” –Bustle
 
“Prescient, provocative, and furiously comic.” —The New Statesman
 
“An expansive, probing and enigmatic novel of ideas…Chapters range from a few sentences to dozens of pages, creating a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the mutability and movement of humanity.” –amNewYork
 
“A graceful and philosophic meditation on travel.” –Newsday
 
“A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them. No two readers will experience it exactly the same way. Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited. Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it reflects, challenges, and rewards.” –Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“An intellectual revelation… Flights seeks out bridges between the concepts of cosmopolitanism and cultural hybridity; between discoveries of affection and curiosity toward unknown cultures, and toward the intrinsic multiplicity of one’s own place of origin.” –Boston Review
 
“Flights is epic in its scope and mission. … [The novel] reads as a sprawling, surreal meditation on what it is to be alive in an increasingly transient world.” –Vox
 
“If a strictly linear narrative structure is obligatory to your definition of what makes for a ‘good book,’ I’d encourage you to set that requirement aside for a bit and consider this 2018 Booker Prize winner. … Themes and patterns will begin to emerge of lives and loves and a rocket ship ride through the swirl of stars that is us. An added bonus: Jennifer Croft’s translation (from Polish) is a joy to read and a template for a translation master class.” –The Millions

“Deftly explores, in limpid, captivating vignettes, the spaces we inhabit—bodies, geographies, the expanse of the page—and the loves, fears, and wonder that inhabit us.” –Literary Hub
 
“An indisputable masterpiece.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This host of haunting narratives teases the mind and taunts the soul... exhilarating.” —Library Journal

From the Publisher

★ 08/01/2018
Winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, this work from Polish author Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night) delivers a compounded constellation of coevolving concepts in a set of related passages, some with several installments. Among them: the disappearance of Kunicki's wife and children on a Mediterranean island, Josefine Soliman's three letters to the Emperor of Austria asking for the stuffed body of her father, and the travels of Dr. Blau, who covets the secrets of plastination—the preservation of human body parts. Themes of travel but also escape and flight are pervasive, as is information about bodies dried and stuffed, pickled in preservative, or, in a more modern bent, preserved with plastic polymer. Sprinkled throughout are more brief expostulations; Eryk the absconding ferry driver is notable, as well as the unnamed woman who unceremoniously provides assisted suicide to a dying friend. VERDICT This host of haunting narratives teases the mind and taunts the soul, providing multiple paths of escape in response to questions about existence and the life's struggles. As a preservative solution of severed threads, it relies on readers for assemblage, and the task is exhilarating indeed. [See Prepub Alert, 2/26/18.]—Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA

Library Journal

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