NOVEMBER 2018 - AudioFile
Narrator Julia Whelan shifts so smoothly through the stylistic turns of this fragmentary novel that one may well forget she is the lone narrator. Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 National Book Award Finalist is a challenge. Each of the more than 100 chapters reads like a stand-alone reflection on the human desire to keep others close—or, conversely, to flee others’ constraints. Some storylines do recur, such as that of Chopin’s sister, who attempts to smuggle the late composer’s heart from France back home to Poland to be buried, or another of a man as much overcome by the reappearance of his wife and child as by their disappearance. While FLIGHTS may be a turbulent ride, if listeners stick with Whelan’s narration, she’ll take them where they need to go. K.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
The New York Times - Parul Sehgal
It's a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons—the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy—we venture forth into the world…Flights is a cabinet of curiosities, of "moments, crumbs, fleeting configurations." The book is transhistorical, transnational; it leaps back and forth through time, across fiction and fact. Interspersed with the narrator's journey is a constellation of discrete stories that share rhyming motifs and certain turns of phrase. These vignettes often have the flavor of case studies, with interlocking themes related to the brittleness of the body and the complicated work of mourning…As plots ramify and the cast grows, the individual vignettes are themselves sculpted, and anchoring. In Jennifer Croft's assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced. And Tokarczuk has a canny knack for reading the reader, for anticipating your criticisms.
Publishers Weekly
★ 05/28/2018
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize, this novel from Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night) is an indisputable masterpiece of "controlled psychosis," as one of the characters phrases it. Written in a cacophony of voices, the book's themes accumulate not from plot, but rather associations and resonances. It begins in Croatia, where a tourist, Kunicki, is lazily smoking cigarettes beside his car in an island olive grove, waiting for his wife and son to return from a short walk. Except they don't, and Kunicki must frantically search for his lost family in a sun-drenched paradise, 10 kilometers in diameter. The novel then, after some number of pages and disjointed narratives, joins the peculiar anatomist Dr. Blau's journey to the seaside village home of a recently deceased rival. This prompts the retelling of the sad, true tale of Angelo Soliman, born in Nigeria, who had lived as a dignified and respected Viennese courtier, only to be mummified and displayed by Francis I as a racial specimen "wearing only a grass band." This rumination on anatomy brings into the text the anatomist Philip Verheyen, born in 1648 in Flanders, who keeps his amputated leg, preserved in alcohol, on the headboard of his bed. The novel continues in this vein—dipping in and out of submerged stories, truths, and flights of fantasy stitched together by associations. Punctuated by maps and figures, the discursive novel is reminiscent of the work of Sebald. The threads ultimately converge in a remarkable way, making this an extraordinary accomplishment. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Flights:
"What’s in a novel? This Man Booker International Prize winner reads like a rigorous response to that question in the best, most edifying (and maddening) way…Magnificently translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, Flights has the scattered intimate quality of a personal diary, its magic wedded to its singularity. It’s an unexpected, funny journey into that most elusive of places — the human condition." –Entertainment Weekly
“A revelation … Flights is a witty, imaginative, hard-to-classify work that is in the broadest sense about travel…. In this risky, restlessly mercurial book, Tokarczuk has found a way of turning…philosophy into writing that doesn't just take flight but soars.” – NPR’s “Fresh Air”
“A beautifully fragmented look at man’s longing for permanence … ambitious and complex.” —Washington Post
“It’s a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons — the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy — we venture forth into the world …In Jennifer Croft’s assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced.” —The New York Times
“A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.” –Annie Proulx
“Tokarczuk’s discerning eye shakes things up, in the same way that her book scrambles conventional forms... Like her characters, our narrator is always on the move, and is always noticing and theorizing, often brilliantly.” —The New Yorker
“There's no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times.” —The Guardian
“Dive in beyond physical place to the mind of the traveler in this experimental collection of interwoven stories, essays, and musings as delightfully meandering as wanderlust itself.” –Fodor’s Travels
“Flights works like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.”—Marlon James
“This hypnotizing new novel about travel, movement, and the complexities of distance deserves a place on every bookshelf.” —Southern Living
“Provides food for thought about what makes us move and what makes us tick.… Travel may broaden the mind, but this travel-themed book stimulates it.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Take the time to settle into this unconventional narrative that is by turns startling, moving and profound.” –Dallas Morning News
“An unclassifiable medley of linked fictions and essays.… Reading it is like being a passenger on a long trip.... It’s amusing, exciting.... It moves... to moments of intense interest and beauty.” —Wall Street Journal
“A disorienting, intelligent, and unforgettable book.” –Bustle
“Prescient, provocative, and furiously comic.” —The New Statesman
“An expansive, probing and enigmatic novel of ideas…Chapters range from a few sentences to dozens of pages, creating a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the mutability and movement of humanity.” –amNewYork
“A graceful and philosophic meditation on travel.” –Newsday
“A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them. No two readers will experience it exactly the same way. Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited. Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it reflects, challenges, and rewards.” –Los Angeles Review of Books
“An intellectual revelation… Flights seeks out bridges between the concepts of cosmopolitanism and cultural hybridity; between discoveries of affection and curiosity toward unknown cultures, and toward the intrinsic multiplicity of one’s own place of origin.” –Boston Review
“Flights is epic in its scope and mission. … [The novel] reads as a sprawling, surreal meditation on what it is to be alive in an increasingly transient world.” –Vox
“If a strictly linear narrative structure is obligatory to your definition of what makes for a ‘good book,’ I’d encourage you to set that requirement aside for a bit and consider this 2018 Booker Prize winner. … Themes and patterns will begin to emerge of lives and loves and a rocket ship ride through the swirl of stars that is us. An added bonus: Jennifer Croft’s translation (from Polish) is a joy to read and a template for a translation master class.” –The Millions
“Deftly explores, in limpid, captivating vignettes, the spaces we inhabit—bodies, geographies, the expanse of the page—and the loves, fears, and wonder that inhabit us.” –Literary Hub
“An indisputable masterpiece.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review
“This host of haunting narratives teases the mind and taunts the soul... exhilarating.” —Library Journal
NOVEMBER 2018 - AudioFile
Narrator Julia Whelan shifts so smoothly through the stylistic turns of this fragmentary novel that one may well forget she is the lone narrator. Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 National Book Award Finalist is a challenge. Each of the more than 100 chapters reads like a stand-alone reflection on the human desire to keep others close—or, conversely, to flee others’ constraints. Some storylines do recur, such as that of Chopin’s sister, who attempts to smuggle the late composer’s heart from France back home to Poland to be buried, or another of a man as much overcome by the reappearance of his wife and child as by their disappearance. While FLIGHTS may be a turbulent ride, if listeners stick with Whelan’s narration, she’ll take them where they need to go. K.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-05-15
Thoughts on travel as an existential adventure from one of Poland's most lauded and popular authors.Already a huge commercial and critical success in her native country, Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night, 2003) captured the attention of Anglophone readers when this book was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. In addition to being a fiction writer, Tokarczuk is also an essayist and a psychologist and an activist known—and sometimes reviled—for her cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist views. Her wide-ranging interests are evident in this volume. It's not a novel exactly. It's not even a collection of intertwined short stories, although there are longer sections featuring recurring characters and well-developed narratives. Overall, though, this is a series of fragments tenuously linked by the idea of travel—through space and also through time—and a thoughtful, ironic voice. Movement from one place to another, from one thought to another, defines both the preoccupations of this discursive text and its style. One of the extended stories follows a man named Kunicki whose wife and child disappear on vacation—and suddenly reappear. A first-person narrator offers a sort of memoir through movement, recalling her own peregrinations bit by bit. There are pilgrims and holidaymakers. Tokarczuk also explores the connection between travel and colonialism with side trips into "exotic" practices and cabinets of curiosity. There are philosophical digressions, like a meditation on the flight from Irkutsk to Moscow that lands at the same time it takes off. None of this is to say that this book is dry or didactic. Tokarczuk has a sly sense of humor. It's impossible not to laugh at the opening line, "I'm reminded of something that Borges was once reminded of…." Of course someone interested in maps and territories, of the emotional landscape of travel and the difference between memory and reality would feel an affinity for the Argentine fabulist.A welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature.
