Flights

Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk, was published in 2007 in Kraków, Poland. It was translated into English in 2017 by Jennifer Croft and received the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Olga Tokarczuk also won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work with Flights. This literary fiction novel discusses themes of movement, travel, and writing’s role in preserving both human life and death. Flights combines the narrator’s travel writing fragments with fictional vignettes that explore the narrator’s observations through a specific character’s perspective. 

Plot Summary

In Flights, the unnamed narrator combines a series of travel writing fragments with fictional vignettes. These vignettes center around characters based on either strangers that the narrator has met during her travels or on historical figures. Without distinct chapters, the text of the novel is broken only by the shift from fragment to fragment or from fragment to fiction. This allows the narrator to explore the dissolution of boundaries and of linear time—ideas that she has encountered at lectures given by travel psychologists at various airports around the world. The narrator discusses her own writing, the morality of telling stories, and those stories’ possible impact on a global capitalistic society with which she strongly disagrees; in her view, movement and curiosity are innate human impulses that modern society has suppressed.