On Display, the Stings and Errors of Creation

“Flights,” the newly translated novel by Olga Tokarczuk, winner of this year’s International Man Booker Prize, was first published in Poland in 2008 as “Bieguni,” a word for a fictional group of Slavic wanderers who seek salvation in constant motion. “My energy derives from movement — from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking,” the nameless narrator tells us. As a child, she’d watch boats, longing to become one herself.

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. The narrator, coolly evasive in the way of Rachel Cusk’s heroine in the Outline trilogy, relishes how travel and growing older allow her to become invisible. She can become a “gargantuan ear,” a repository of narratives as her fascination with teratology — the study of “the errors and blunders of creation” — takes her to specialized museums around the world, to contemplate salamanders with two tails; oddly-shaped apples; a fetus, floating serenely in a jar, with its one head and two bodies.

“Flights” itself 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. (Tokarczuk once worked as a clinical psychologist. She quit, she has said, when she realized that she was “much more neurotic than my clients.”)

In one episode, an apparent homage to Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “L’Avventura,” a mother and child go mysteriously missing on an island. In another, a woman returns to Poland after decades abroad, to help her first love, now terminally ill, die. The most bizarre stories are taken from life. Chopin’s sister carries his heart in a jar from Paris to Warsaw, to bury it at home. The Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen discovers the Achilles tendon while dissecting his own amputated leg. The most harrowing tale is of Angelo Soliman, kidnapped as a child, possibly from Nigeria, and taken to Austria as a sort of pet. He became a courtier and was acquainted with Mozart. When he died, his body was skinned, stuffed and displayed. Tokarczuk re-creates the desperate letters of Soliman’s daughter to the court, begging for a decent burial for her father.

Shaggy maximalism is the ethic and aesthetic of “Flights.” It is thronged with plots and subplots, flotillas of travelers who barge in to make thunderous confessions and vanish, never to be seen again. You might wish that novels, like elevators and taxis, had a strict maximum carrying capacity; it feels impossible to connect to characters no sooner conjured than whisked away and replaced. Monotony settles in; we read at a remove, which feels cruel given that Tokarczuk’s aim is so clearly to train the eye to see more deeply, more attentively, and to root out hidden consonances and meanings.

Still, 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. Just as you’re yearning for her to take control of these stories and give them some kind of legible through line, she asks, teasingly: “Wouldn’t it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins, and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single thought gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs?”

This novel was written in a simpler time, the author has said, more than 10 years ago, before nationalist movements and violent xenophobia erupted again in Europe. Totalitarianism seems safely in the past in this book, the movement of people a natural right. “Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness — these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized,” she writes. “Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.”

There are intimations of gathering darkness, however. At an airport, the narrator sees a slogan plastered on a glass wall: “Mobility is reality.” It is, she informs us wryly, just an ad for mobile phones.

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Publication Notes:

“Flights”

By Olga Tokarczuk

Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft

Illustrated. 403 pages. Riverhead Books. $26.