Bookies! Spoiler Free Book Review & Recommendation: Flights by Olga Tokarczuk.

Published in English on August 14, 2018, Flights by Olga Tokarczuk is a very interesting novel composed of short stories illustrating travel and stasis. Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion in space and time. Tokarczuk asks the question, “Where are you going?”.

In an interview, Tokarczuk discussed how borders in her native Poland changed after WW2. One now abandoned border stop was located in a forest near her home. She expressed how she would walk into that forest and walk past the border and return. That small act of traversing a border that was once guarded by heavily armed men represented a sense of freedom.

In the context of this novel, Flights can mean travel or it can also represent something interior in how the soul moves. Read Flights with both in mind. Tokarczuk explores change and its converse preservation.

In Flights we have significant descriptions of individuals involved in the preservation of the body. While I found these elements to be the most abstract and least enjoyable, I read them as representing stasis … the act of preservation or standing still. It is the opposite of movement and the energy that comes with movement. Movement is energy and stasis is control.

Tokarczuk imbues Flights with a sense of constant travel and movement as the essence of life. Compare this to life on an island where all is determined by a shore … a boundary.

Tokarczuk invites you to he project your own life and interests into the novel. Flights is interactive in the best sense. It demands you engage.

The video reflects how I engaged with the novel. What it brought to me. If you likewise read thoughtfully and, in the quiet moments, reflect on what travel and return means to you, I believe this novel will enrich you.

Tokarczuk also gives us this sense of modern travel through her unnamed female traveler. Where we jump from place to place without traveling through. Should nothing be skipped or bypassed? Flights gives a sense of modern travel as putting us everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Whether by air travel or by the expanse of life experience, we often neglect to travel through. Do we pause to reflect, and, if so, what have we learned?

Flights is not for everyone, so I wish to give fair warning. There are diversions which may not make sense to you. The reflections on preservation of the body are, in this reviewer's view, a distraction. If you enjoy linear plots where the novel arrives at a conclusion rather than simply suggests a theme, then this novel is not for you. It will feel like a confused jumble of unrelated stories.

If, however, you engage with Flights and apply it to your own life, Flights can be quite rewarding.

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk receives a Bookies! rating of 3.75 stars out of 5.

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