Coffee Spew

Flights
Olga Tokarczuk
Translated by Jennifer Croft
Riverhead Books 2018

Reviewed by Bob Wake

The risk reward ratio can be perilous for both reader and writer when embarking on something nebulously described as a “fragmentary novel.” Flights is a win-win. Olga Tokarczuk builds her novel thematically. “Constellation, not sequencing, carries truth,” she writes. Disparate narrative pieces cohere around the theme, or constellation, of travel and dislocation. One strand tells a mystery that unfolds like an Antonioni film. A husband grows frantic when his wife and son fail to return from a morning walk during a family vacation on the Croatian island of Vis. The story line itself disappears for pages at a time while other narrative threads emerge. Later, the mystery returns with the husband searching photographic evidence for signs and clues.

There are deadpan sections of Flights outlining in utterly plausible detail an academic pursuit referred to as travel psychology, whose practitioners meet in airports for their conferences and workshops. “Practical travel psychology investigates the metaphorical meaning of places,” we’re told. Another recurring element of Flights investigates the human body itself as a landscape of infinite inward exploration. The history of phantom pain and the embalming of bodies for medical study are discussed at length. The encyclopedic flurry of anatomical and geographical info must have presented a challenge for Jennifer Croft, who translated the novel with evident eloquence from Olga Tokarczuk’s Polish. No surprise that Croft shared with Tokarczuk the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for Flights. A masterful literary work that feels like a contemporary classic in the making.