![]() ![]() We hear the narrator’s reflections as she travels through an endless succession of airports, which she considers a new human habitat. Flights combines essayistic reflections, fictional stories, and fictionalized histories, varying in length from thirty-odd pages to a paragraph or two, interwoven around two main themes: travel and the preservation of the human body. It is a fiendishly difficult book to describe. Tokarczuk describes the book as a constellation novel, in reference to its complex, nonlinear structure. ![]() ![]() This year’s publication in the United States of her extraordinary novel Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, marks the beginning of what I hope will be Tokarczuk’s true, belated discovery by anglophone readers.įlights was first published in Poland in 2007. She has made her way into translation into numerous languages, but until now, English readers have only had access to two of her books: House of Day, House of Night (Northwestern, 2003) and Primeval and Other Times (Twisted Spoon, 2010), both in translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. There, Tokarczuk’s books are regular best-sellers, have been adapted into films, and set the national discussion in a way many writers can only dream of. Olga Tokarczuk (pronounced toh-kar-chook) is Poland’s greatest living novelist, an author of endless variety, as popular as she is controversial in her homeland. One of Europe’s most important and original voices finally, after many years, has a new book on the English-language market. ![]()
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