Flights

Flights is Olga Tokarczuk's 2007 novel (English translation by Jennifer Croft published 2017), the International Booker Prize winner of 2018 and the work that established Tokarczuk's broader English-language readership before her 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature (awarded 2019). The structural premise is the fragmented investigation of travel, the human body, and the broader question of what it means to be in motion across the early twenty-first century. The novel rotates approximately one hundred sixteen vignettes, fragments, and embedded stories across the broader meditation: contemporary first-person travel essays from a present-day narrator; embedded historical-and-anatomical chapters about the eighteenth-century anatomist Frederik Ruysch and the broader history of preserved human-body specimens; the chronicle of the Russian Empress Anna Ivanovna's preserved African slave Angelo Soliman; the story of Filip Verheyen, the seventeenth-century Flemish anatomist who dissected his own amputated leg; the long sustained Wim Hof immersion chapter; and approximately one hundred ten further fragments.

Tokarczuk's structural method is the patient archipelagic fragment-construction that Tokarczuk has been refining across her broader catalog (House of Day House of Night 1998, Primeval and Other Times 1996, The Books of Jacob 2014). The novel does not have a conventional plot. The Frederik Ruysch and Filip Verheyen embedded historical chapters in the middle third are some of the strongest contemporary European literary prose about a specific kind of seventeenth-century-and-eighteenth-century European anatomical-and-philosophical investigation. The novel's structural argument (that the operational mechanics of contemporary travel-and-mobility have produced a specific kind of relationship to the human body that the broader contemporary international literary fiction has not historically committed to at this scale) is made through the texture of the archipelagic-fragment construction rather than through any direct argument. The novel reads in the patient post-modern-fragmentary register Tokarczuk has been refining across the broader catalog.

Recommended as required contemporary Polish-translated literary fiction reading, as the right Tokarczuk entry point for readers coming to her catalog before The Books of Jacob (her structural masterwork), and as one of the canonical 2010s international literary novels. Compare to Sebald, W. G., Anne Carson, and contemporary European literary essayistic fiction. The Julia Whelan audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.