A review by sharkybookshelf
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

3.0

Musings on travel and anatomy; moments of life, death, motion and migration through time…

This was my first Tokarczuk, and although I didn’t particularly enjoy it, it has actually left me keen to read more of her work - the writing was undeniably excellent and full of astute observations, especially on travel and language and the philosophy of life.

My struggle with Flights was its highly fragmented nature. The fragments were just far too disparate, and although some did link up to form small storylines, taken all together, they never coalesced into something cohesive. I spent the book wondering how the themes of travel and anatomy were going to come together, and, well, I’m still waiting. I loved the random maps (I find maps fascinating), but they were mostly exactly that: random, with no clear connection to the text.

Cabinets of curiosities are mentioned and alluded to throughout, and it’s an apt analogy for the book itself - filled with plenty of disconnected objects/observations, displayed/collected together because they arouse curiosity or are interesting, but without any particular relation to each other. To take the analogy further, the longer fragments that formed a story could be equivalent to objects of which much is known, the shorter ones to objects that don’t have much background information but are vaguely interesting and so kept in the collection. The fragments were also very uneven in terms of holding my interest or attention - I whizzed through some, and others felt like slogs, even at a few pages long.

A highly fragmented novel that explores travel and anatomy, excellent writing and clever observations but lacking overall cohesion and consistency.