Flights

Starred review from May 28, 2018
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize, this novel from Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night) is an indisputable masterpiece of "controlled psychosis," as one of the characters phrases it. Written in a cacophony of voices, the book's themes accumulate not from plot, but rather associations and resonances. It begins in Croatia, where a tourist, Kunicki, is lazily smoking cigarettes beside his car in an island olive grove, waiting for his wife and son to return from a short walk. Except they don't, and Kunicki must frantically search for his lost family in a sun-drenched paradise, 10 kilometers in diameter. The novel then, after some number of pages and disjointed narratives, joins the peculiar anatomist Dr. Blau's journey to the seaside village home of a recently deceased rival. This prompts the retelling of the sad, true tale of Angelo Soliman, born in Nigeria, who had lived as a dignified and respected Viennese courtier, only to be mummified and displayed by Francis I as a racial specimen "wearing only a grass band." This rumination on anatomy brings into the text the anatomist Philip Verheyen, born in 1648 in Flanders, who keeps his amputated leg, preserved in alcohol, on the headboard of his bed. The novel continues in this veinâdipping in and out of submerged stories, truths, and flights of fantasy stitched together by associations. Punctuated by maps and figures, the discursive novel is reminiscent of the work of Sebald. The threads ultimately converge in a remarkable way, making this an extraordinary accomplishment.

June 1, 2018
Thoughts on travel as an existential adventure from one of Poland's most lauded and popular authors.Already a huge commercial and critical success in her native country, Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night, 2003) captured the attention of Anglophone readers when this book was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. In addition to being a fiction writer, Tokarczuk is also an essayist and a psychologist and an activist known--and sometimes reviled--for her cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist views. Her wide-ranging interests are evident in this volume. It's not a novel exactly. It's not even a collection of intertwined short stories, although there are longer sections featuring recurring characters and well-developed narratives. Overall, though, this is a series of fragments tenuously linked by the idea of travel--through space and also through time--and a thoughtful, ironic voice. Movement from one place to another, from one thought to another, defines both the preoccupations of this discursive text and its style. One of the extended stories follows a man named Kunicki whose wife and child disappear on vacation--and suddenly reappear. A first-person narrator offers a sort of memoir through movement, recalling her own peregrinations bit by bit. There are pilgrims and holidaymakers. Tokarczuk also explores the connection between travel and colonialism with side trips into "exotic" practices and cabinets of curiosity. There are philosophical digressions, like a meditation on the flight from Irkutsk to Moscow that lands at the same time it takes off. None of this is to say that this book is dry or didactic. Tokarczuk has a sly sense of humor. It's impossible not to laugh at the opening line, "I'm reminded of something that Borges was once reminded of...." Of course someone interested in maps and territories, of the emotional landscape of travel and the difference between memory and reality would feel an affinity for the Argentine fabulist.A welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature.

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Starred review from August 1, 2018

Winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, this work from Polish author Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night) delivers a compounded constellation of coevolving concepts in a set of related passages, some with several installments. Among them: the disappearance of Kunicki's wife and children on a Mediterranean island, Josefine Soliman's three letters to the Emperor of Austria asking for the stuffed body of her father, and the travels of Dr. Blau, who covets the secrets of plastination--the preservation of human body parts. Themes of travel but also escape and flight are pervasive, as is information about bodies dried and stuffed, pickled in preservative, or, in a more modern bent, preserved with plastic polymer. Sprinkled throughout are more brief expostulations; Eryk the absconding ferry driver is notable, as well as the unnamed woman who unceremoniously provides assisted suicide to a dying friend. VERDICT This host of haunting narratives teases the mind and taunts the soul, providing multiple paths of escape in response to questions about existence and the life's struggles. As a preservative solution of severed threads, it relies on readers for assemblage, and the task is exhilarating indeed. [See Prepub Alert, 2/26/18.]--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2018

Twice winner of Poland's top literary award and a big name in European literature, Tokarczuk presents a novel of ideas blending disparate fragments, from a woman bearing Chopin's heart back to Poland to a vacationer reading French-Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran. It's all tied together by the bieguni, or wanderers, a mysterious Slavic sect. Not for the plot-obsessed, but I can't wait.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.