Flights, Olga Tokarczuk
It feels as though I can’t start any review at the moment without mentioning the strange time we are living and reading in. On the Literary Friction podcast, Carrie Flitt and Octavia Bright talked about the fact that some people are using reading as an escape, whereas some just can’t get their brains to focus.
I wish I could say that I have used books as an escape, but I think I fall into the second category - I just can’t focus. That being said, I finally managed to finish Flights after stopping and starting a few times, and actually, it was the best book because my brain didn’t have to focus for too long.
This is because Flights is made up of fragments; some only a handful of sentences long. These fragments include memoirs, narratives, cultural anthropology, and fictionalised events - none of which are connected, and many of which remain unresolved. This might sound frustrating, but I loved the disjointedness. In fact, I sometimes find it too predictable when fragmented narratives are miraculously tied together through a brilliantly plotted thread.
Instead, Olga allows us to briefly be a part of a moment in history, before being moved on to the next vignette. In fact, this experience mirrors the main theme of Flights - travel. We meander through different stories, from the absurd to the endearing. Some of the stories I remember, and some I don’t, but I don’t think that is the point. Without sounding ridiculously cliche, I felt that the very heart of this book is the journey through different philosophies and ideas.
Flights deals with some complex ideas, ranging from the human body and its impermanence, ephemerality and permanence, and whether we, as humans, can ever have a fixed home. My favourite Flights fragment presents a history of human movement and a call to arms on the virtues of mobility.
Much like Olga’s narrator, I tend to be drawn to things that deviate from the norm, which Flights certainly does; it isn’t limited to one genre, it doesn’t present convenient conclusions, but it does take its reader on an unexpected journey. And at this moment in time, isn’t that what we are all looking for?
