The travel I witness is often forced: exodus, the tribulation of exile, flight from violence or famine. This narrator is “drawn to all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken,” largely of the Kunstkammer variety: she lingers in museums of curiosities several of her characters dismember and preserve dead bodies for the purposes of science or passion or for personal bemusement. The protagonist, a perpetual traveler, intersperses essayistic observation on motion with sketches of other eccentric voyagers, real and fictionalized: Frédéric Chopin’s sister, a Scandinavian woman who documents abuse against animals worldwide, a Russian housewife who runs away from home.

The travel Tokarczuk portrays is the stuff of airport hotels and dinner vouchers. Then I noticed: something in the mirror was awry. I delighted in the affinity-delighted doubly because of the exquisite intelligence of this new traveling companion, because Tokarczuk’s prose is hypnotic, spellbinding in both imagination and rendering. There was a map of my city of birth on page thirty-seven! I became giddy: it was like looking in the mirror. At first, it felt like one of those airplane encounters that confirm barely six degrees of separation between you and the passenger in the next seat: both Tokarczuk’s unnamed female narrator and I grew up in Eastern Europe she studied psychology and I was raised by a psychotherapist father both of us travel a lot, alone I also wrote a book about life on the hoof. Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights is about movement, and it so happened that I read it in motion, mostly on planes.

Flights review olga