Flights

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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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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
 
“Flightsis 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

About the Author

Olga Tokarczuk has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Book International Prize, among many other honors. She is the author of a dozen works of fiction, two collections of essays, and a children’s book; her work has been translated into fifty languages.

Review:

4.5 out of 5

90.00% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars A book that changes how you look at the ordinary

R.S. · June 28, 2022

This is one of the rare books that change how you look at the ordinary and helps you recognize the extraordinary around you.It consists of short essays, interspersed with stories, that spill over to one another and interconnect in unexpected ways. Some of the essays make me think of The Art of Travel by Alain de Boton, and some of the fiction reminds me of Borges.Here's a sampling of passages that caught my eye:"I dreamed of working on a boat like that when I grew up -- or even better, of becoming one of those boats. It wasn't a big river ... a minor one ... a kind of country vicountess at the court of the Bolo queen. But it was more than enough for me." p 3"... I realized that .... a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest, that change will always be a nobler thing and permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ask, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity." p. 4"I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature." p. 17"I think there are a lot of people like me. Who aren't around, who've disappeared. They show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigration officers stamp their passports, or when the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their keys." p. 52"Every moment is unique; no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favors risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. p. 53"Description is akin to overuse -- it destroys; the colors wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what's been described begins to fade, to disappear. ... Guidebooks have conclusively ruined the greater part of the planet; published in editions numbering in the millions, in many languages, they have debilitated place, pinning them down and naming them, blurring their contours." p. 69"... you have to step in between the words, into the unfathomable abysses between ideas. With every step we'll slip and fall." p. 73"What will you see here? The very edge of the world, where time, reflected off the empty waterfront, turns around disappointed and heads toward land and pitilessly leaves this place to its perpetual enduring." p. 83"Each year more people are killed by kicks from donkeys than by plane crashes. If you wind up at the bottom of a well, you'll be able to see the stars even during the day." pp. 102-103[about deserts and beaches] "What if they're entirely made up of the posthumous essences of the bodies of enlightened beings? p. 167"... we experience time and space in a manner that is primarily unconscious. These are not categories we could call objective, or external. Our sense of space results from our ability to move. Our sense of time, meanwhile, is due to being biological individuals undergoing distinct and changing states. Time is thus nothing other than the flow of changes." p. 171"... one becomes what one participates in. In other words, I am what I look at." p. 173"... the suspect nature of what we naively take to be reality." p. 190"The nocturnal brain is a Penelope unraveling the cloth of meaning diligently woven during the day." p. 227"... with age, memory starts to slowly open its holographic chams..." p. 289"Children become people when they wriggle out of your arms and say 'no.'" p. 349"That smile of theirs holds -- or so it strikes me -- a kind of promise that perhaps we will b born anew now, this time in the right time and the right place." p. 403

4.0 out of 5 stars A tangled web of wanderlust and mummification

K.J. · May 19, 2020

Flights, a work of fiction by 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, was originally published in 2007 under the Polish title of Bieguni. Though not a novel in the traditional sense of the word, Flights is considered a novel because there really isn’t any better word to describe its narrative structure. The text consists of 116 very loosely connected scenes, some of which are long enough to qualify as short stories, but most only a page or two in length. These vignettes are a mix of contemporary and historical fiction, as well as mini-essays, all jumbled in sequence both chronologically and thematically.Much of the text is written from the first-person perspective of an unnamed female narrator who is a writer by trade. In the book’s early scenes, this narrator explains that she is essentially addicted to travel and leads a nomadic globe-trotting existence. Of all the wonders the world has to offer, the sites that most fascinate her are “cabinets of curiosities,” particularly those museums and exhibitions focusing on human anatomy. Like an Atlas Obscura junkie, this traveler seeks out the curious and the bizarre, relishing every opportunity to gaze at centuries-old organs preserved in jars, relics of freakish physiological anomalies, or dissected human bodies encapsulated and displayed in blocks of transparent lucite. Thus, two thematic streams flow throughout the book: travel and anatomy. While Tokarczuk expounds very eloquently and creatively on both subjects, the connection between the two is very tenuous at best, which often makes Flights feel like you are reading two separate novels that have been shuffled together like mismatched decks of cards.In the travel portions of the book, the narrator sometimes relates the stories of fellow travelers she has met in her journeys. Other passages describe the sights, sounds, and customs of exotic locales. Usually the destinations are not named, which can be frustratingly disorienting. Often the shorter entries read like nonfiction asides, consisting of the kind of observational humor on airports, hotels, and the inconveniences of travel that Jerry Seinfeld might come up with if he had a PhD in psychology. Of the fictional vignettes, the most interesting “short story” concerns a Polish family vacationing on a Croatian island. The husband pulls their car over to the side of a road to let his wife and child go to the bathroom in the bushes. They never return to the car and appear to have vanished, leaving him to figure out what happened. Unfortunately, like many of the scenes in Flights, the fragmentary nature of the storytelling proves unsatisfyingly inconclusive.The anatomical vignettes, in general, are more compelling. In addition to the narrator’s visits to modern medical museums, Tokarczuk delves back in time as far as the 17th century to deliver fictional sketches on pioneering anatomists of the past, including some characters based on actual historical personages. The common thread uniting these flashbacks is the scientists’ search for an ideal method of preserving, embalming, or “plasticizing” human tissue—­a problem ultimately solved by the polymers used in today’s anatomical exhibitions.Judging from the English translation by Jennifer Croft, Tokarczuk is a very talented writer with an expert command of language, keen insight into human nature, and an acute and amusing wit. Each scene in Flights is captivating in its own way, but the work as a whole feels disjointed, indeterminate, and meandering. Though its parts may be greater than its whole, Flights is nonetheless worth a read, and it makes one want to delve further into Tokarczuk’s body of work.

5.0 out of 5 stars Flight is constant self-renewal and self-discovery.

D.B. · January 20, 2020

Imaginative writing. Short loosely coupled vignettes written with class, style, and amazing talent. It took me was while to acclimating to the format, but that quickly transformed itself into a refreshing short storytelling device. The translation of the book is superb. I think the English adaptation of the book in itself should be awarded.I started this book assuming that this is just another travel book. However, the short stories and vignettes are loosely intertwined. This is the type of book you can read a million times, each time discovering something new. Flights is about constant movement, inevitable change, to move is to escape stagnation, eventual, decline,and impending death. Flight is about constant self-renewal and self-discovery.A truly unique book, extremely skilled authorship and translation, and highly recommended.

3.0 out of 5 stars Travel Psychology

R.C. · April 20, 2024

Beautifully written travelogue of a unique sort. It isn’t “about” anything but there are several threads—death as a destination, nobody is ever in the right place at the right time (synchronicity), and the incidents of life are the only things with meaning. As I said, beautifully written. But not at all my taste. Someone else reading/observing the book might give it a higher number of stars. That would make sense.

5.0 out of 5 stars print is faint

I.r. · June 22, 2024

I want to and will read this book, and give it 5 stars because I'm sure the book and its translation will deserve it. This is a warning, though: I just received the paperback edition, and the print is very faint throughout.

Great book

F.B. · December 7, 2023

Likes it

Good book of olga

B. · May 3, 2024

Books comes in a good quality

Frammenti di viaggi

E.M. · April 13, 2022

La scrittura della Tokarczuk è folgorante. Anche nella traduzione inglese, superba, in cui ho letto il libro.Purtroppo non essendo nè una romanzo, nè un libro di viaggi, nè un trattato scientifico ma un po' tutte queste cose insieme, mi sono persa per strada...alcuni frammenti sono avvincenti e straordinari, molti altri noiosi e quasi insopportabili.Sarà un mio limite, ma il libro non mi ha soddisfatta e non penso che ne leggerò altri di questa autrice.

Thought provoking

A.C. · March 8, 2021

I suppose everything is thought provoking so it's a lazy title. I enjoyed this, although it is fragmented literally it doesn't feel like a collection of short stories or a load of pieces thrown together. It's one work. It is thoughtful but extremely readable, current and relevant but in many ways timeless. So it is thought provoking but I also found it quite relaxing. Recommended certainly.

Excelente servicio!

E.R.V. · January 4, 2020

Fuuw un regalo que hice y le ha encantado a la persona que se lo regalé, muchísimas Gracias!Emilio Río

Flights

4.1

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