A review by tolintook
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

2.0

I know this book has received many awards, so clearly it has a great deal of value, but I didn’t enjoy it. There are perhaps some interesting subtle points in it, but I didn’t appreciate those that I did notice. It was also too fragmented for my taste - it is somewhere between short stories and a novel, and often there was so little character and setting development that I just wasn’t that interested in what happened to the characters. Also, one major theme of the book is the human body, but in the sense that various anatomists become obsessed with cadavers and amputated body parts etc. I have never read a book that goes into so much detail describing cadavers, corpses, mummies, the preserved bodies of creatures of various kinds, the best fluids for preserving cadavers, etc. The other major theme of the book is travelling around the world, and perhaps because I don’t do that I wasn’t interested in the musings on airports, travel psychology, etc. I can see how it could inspire some interesting musing on life, but as a novel it wasn’t enjoyable for me.