Tag: poland

I’ve wanted to read Flights ever since it was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018 and since I saw a copy of the book at one of the stands at a bookstore inside Bangalore Airport. I was mostly drawn to the book due to its title and the plain cobalt blue cover, only later did I realize that Fitzcarraldo Editions has the same cover design for all their fiction novels.

Flights is a collection of vignettes- wayward and yet connected to anatomy, motion, psychology and travel somehow. I cannot say that I loved the book wholly and I cannot extrapolate the rules of synecdoche to this book since it was too different. I was indifferent to some parts of the book and the rest, I loved. It was difficult to understand her writing initially because, for the longest time, I kept trying to wrap my head around – what exactly is this book about? what is the purpose? But I think giving up on trying to find the “meaning or purpose” of this book helped me appreciate this a lot more. I just needed to let the book be, unfurl on its own and so when I ask you to read this with an open mind, please do. Don’t try to figure out what is happening or what is going to happen or the purpose. It’s a multifaceted book and an amalgamation of some visceral vignettes with brilliant prose. Some parts are so hauntingly vivid and some are just average or pointless but then again, the purpose of this book is that it honestly doesn’t have any, and I think that is pretty cool. It’s the kind of book that will either pull you into its lyrical and vivid prose or it will just confound you- for me, it did both. It was kind of like a flight taking off with exhilaration and then landing with some uneasy turbulence.

I’m in awe with the amount of research put into this book- I loved the bits about the Glasmensch by Franz Tschackert in the German Hygiene museum and the stories of the Dutch anatomist Filip Verheyen who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. I’m a fan of anatomy museums and I love watching carcasses of animals or human fetuses or other body parts float in glass jars, so this was 10/10 for me. I also love how Tokarczuk’s writing is embedded with compassion for the environment and animals (I loved ‘Ataturks Reforms’, ‘Whales or Drowning in Air’, and ‘On the Origin of Species’). A soft corner for the peculiar, the unfamiliar and the marginalized is at the heart of her writing [quoting Tokarczuk, “I’m not interested in the patters so scrutinized by statistics that everyone celebrated with a familiar, satisfied smile on their faces. My weakness is for teratology and for freaks. I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly, that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature”]. One of my favourite vignettes is ‘Your Head in the World’ where she talks about her psychology degree, which also took me back to those two years when I superficially studied Psychology in junior college [quoting Tokarczuk, “What we learned at university was that we are made up of defences, of shields and armour, that we are cities whose architecture essentially comes down to walls, ramparts, strongholds: bunker states”].

Somewhere in the middle of the book, I read up on Olga Tokarczuk’s life and novels and also this particular novel and it kind of helped me appreciate the book a little more. As for the translation, I do not know Polish but I can say with some conviction that Croft’s translation does not disappoint. This book definitely calls for a re-read for a better understanding I guess!