Flights olga5/26/2023 ![]() Utilised by backpackers, commuters, airport attendants, security guards, you name it. The book presents life through the lens of three essential questions: where have you come from? Where are you going? Why? A triptych that distils the essence of any human story. This metaphor of movement feels healing now in a global context where time simultaneously feels rapid, erratic and yet lethargic and stretched out. We travel down the spine of continents, tectonic plates, airport runways as if “we are the individual nerve impulses of the world, fractions of an instant”. Using historic examples, personal anecdotes and fictional nomads from all over the world, Tokarczuk depicts a world that is deeply interconnected, like the nervous system of a human being. In Flights, a journey is almost a natural bodily process. As if peaking through the pressurised glass of an air plane you cannot leave, looking down at lands you may know or not, wondering what’s to be seen closer to the ground. Reading Flights during a time when it is forbidden, taboo, dangerous to travel, when a life-threatening ‘thing’ is free to travel in and out of our bodies, feels voyeuristic. In Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, each short story - which run from a few economical paragraphs to long passages of rich narrative- finds romance in the ritualistic ways we travel and the influence it has on our bodies which contain histories, geographies, politics of their own. ![]() ![]() It can be heard or rather, not heard in the empty skies, the clear roads and the absence of commute chatter. ![]()
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