Flights
by Olga Tokarczuk
TL;DR : you keep moving until you’re dead, but if you stop moving you may in fact die first and simply become preserved
What I loved
This book taught me so many random things I never would have thought I would want to know about the preservation of bodies.
The narrator, who is ill-defined but we know for sure is a traveler and collector of stories, takes us all over the place, and we meet so many different people. It’s a fascinating glimpse into so many different worlds.
The way Tokarczuk writes (and is translated I suppose) is so interesting for me. Sometimes it’s detached, sometimes it’s so personal, but the emotional quality is always there despite her narrators always having a very unemotional way of describing things. (I’ve also read The Books of Jacob and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Tokarczuk, which definitely share the same quality.)
The alternation between stories of those traveling (incuding the narrator herself) and stories from the past and present about the development of preservation technqiues for biologial specimens.
What I questioned
Everything. This book has no real plot line, but rather several vignettes that are sometimes told in one continuous section, and sometimes split up by other vignettes. Since I listened to this book, I think was able to deal with the disjointedness slightly better than if I was reading. (I tend to listen to audiobooks while I do chores, commute, etc. so my body is occupied and it’s easier to focus on the audio.) You get the feeling that each section is supposed to invoke a certain feeling from you, but it’s pretty up to the reader to determine that. Tokarczuk’s narrator gives you no commentary on the stories she relates.
One story in particular that stuck with me was split into two sections (if I’m remembeing correctly). A man, his wife, and his son are on vacation on a small island in a foreign country. The key incident in the first section, which follows the husband, is that his wife and son suddenly go missing after he lets them off to go to the bathroom on the side of the road. The ridiculous situation that follows is that no one can find them, even though they are vacationing on a tiny island that only has two villages. The man is desperate to find them, but also intensely suspcious of his wife leaving him, looking at his wife’s baggage for clues. A huge storm hits the island and all traces of the wife and son are lost due to the flooding caused by the storm. Later we catch up with the man and wife, the man seeminlgy suffering from PTSD and often dreaming of the flood. The man cannot come to terms with his wife’s explanation of their disappearance and constantly asks her what happened. This time, however, we follow the wife as she has her rare day alone, in which she does some errands and heads to a church to cry. She feels she is not able to cry anywhere else. She goes home, but finds she cannot enter the house, and begins living as a homeless person. Both of these people seem to have gotten stuck, “preserved” in a moment. They cannot move forward. I felt that this story really encapsulated the themes of movement versus stillness that the books alternated between.
What I thought
Overall, I found the book really fascinating and thought provoking. Just letting it wash over me within much thought while listening, I found myself considering the stories later in the day, trying to figure out what Tokarczuk was getting at. Definitely a more philosophical read!
