Flights
Flights is Olga Tokarczuk's experimental novel made of fragments about travel, movement, the body, preservation, and death. Airports, hotels, anatomical specimens, Chopin's heart, and stories of disappearance intersect as the book asks how constant movement reshapes memory and being.
Work Information
Between bodies in motion and bodies preserved, the novel asks where a person can locate the self.
Originally published in Polish as Bieguni, the novel appeared in English as Flights and in Japanese as Togobo. Short observations, essayistic fragments, historical episodes, and strange travel stories are arranged like a mosaic, setting the desire to keep moving against the desire to preserve. It is a key example of Tokarczuk's border-crossing imagination.
Review Summaries
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The novel is valued for the freedom of its fragmentary form and its philosophical attention to movement. Although its shape resists fixity, concrete details of anatomy and history give the work a powerful texture.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Published
- 2017-05-17
- Pages
- 424 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.5 x 2.18 x 19.71 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781910695432
- ISBN-10
- 1910695432
- Price
- 3493 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Contemporary
Flights , a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk’s most ambitious to date. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death. In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin’s heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw. In the present we have the trials of a wife accompanying her much older husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, and the harrowing story of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish on a holiday on a Croatian island. With her signature grace and insight, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind.
Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels, three short story collections and has been translated into more than fifty languages. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, in Jennifer Croft’s translation. She is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. House of Day, House of Night is her fifth novel to appear in English with Fitzcarraldo Editions. Jennifer Croft was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2018 and was a National Book Award Finalist for her translation from Polish of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights . She is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation and a Tin House Workshop Scholarship for her memoir Homesick .
Reviews
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Brilliant.
A brilliant work, sublime in its unique sensibility and and rendering of the world in rich, magnificent story telling, wise, philosophical, whimsical, that effortlessly merges layers of time, the past, present and future. I swoon at the sheer beauty of where such exquisite literature can transport one.
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A beautiful and clever book about everything
Flights is a book to read while traveling, or while thinking of travel, or while pondering the nature of things, or while ageing or preparing to, or in fact any time. The 100+ vignettes, stories and collected thoughts are like a 17th century anatomist’s collection, a topic much explored in the book. A book to read and to share.
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A book that changes how you look at the ordinary
This is one of the rare books that change how you look at the ordinary and helps you recognize the extraordinary around you. It consists of short essays, interspersed with stories, that spill over to one another and interconnect in unexpected ways. Some of the essays make me think of The Art of Travel by Alain de Boton, and some of the fiction reminds me of Borges. Here's a sampling of passages that caught my eye: "I dreamed of working on a boat like that when I grew up -- or even better, of becoming one of those boats. It wasn't a big river ... a minor one ... a kind of country vicountess at the court of the Amazon queen. But it was more than enough for me." p 3 "... I realized that .... a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest, that change will always be a nobler thing and permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ask, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity." p. 4 "I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature." p. 17 "I think there are a lot of people like me. Who aren't around, who've disappeared. They show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigration officers stamp their passports, or when the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their keys." p. 52 "Every moment is unique; no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favors risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. p. 53 "Description is akin to overuse -- it destroys; the colors wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what's been described begins to fade, to disappear. ... Guidebooks have conclusively ruined the greater part of the planet; published in editions numbering in the millions, in many languages, they have debilitated place, pinning them down and naming them, blurring their contours." p. 69 "... you have to step in between the words, into the unfathomable abysses between ideas. With every step we'll slip and fall." p. 73 "What will you see here? The very edge of the world, where time, reflected off the empty waterfront, turns around disappointed and heads toward land and pitilessly leaves this place to its perpetual enduring." p. 83 "Each year more people are killed by kicks from donkeys than by plane crashes. If you wind up at the bottom of a well, you'll be able to see the stars even during the day." pp. 102-103 [about deserts and beaches] "What if they're entirely made up of the posthumous essences of the bodies of enlightened beings? p. 167 "... we experience time and space in a manner that is primarily unconscious. These are not categories we could call objective, or external. Our sense of space results from our ability to move. Our sense of time, meanwhile, is due to being biological individuals undergoing distinct and changing states. Time is thus nothing other than the flow of changes." p. 171 "... one becomes what one participates in. In other words, I am what I look at." p. 173 "... the suspect nature of what we naively take to be reality." p. 190 "The nocturnal brain is a Penelope unraveling the cloth of meaning diligently woven during the day." p. 227 "... with age, memory starts to slowly open its holographic chams..." p. 289 "Children become people when they wriggle out of your arms and say 'no.'" p. 349 "That smile of theirs holds -- or so it strikes me -- a kind of promise that perhaps we will b born anew now, this time in the right time and the right place." p. 403
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Incredible book
Fantastic book! Incredible translation
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Excelente servicio!
Fuuw un regalo que hice y le ha encantado a la persona que se lo regalé, muchísimas Gracias! Emilio Río