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A review by rebekah_nobody
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
3.0
“[T]o someone from nowhere, every movement turns into a return”
The only upside to our Bad Flight Itinerary of August 2019 was experiencing this book in its natural habitat. ReviewReader, if you continue you will be exposed to an account of said itinerary, and I know if it was me, but not my review, I would appreciate the warning and stop here.
Book selected the morning we left Tokyo, continued in spurts during takeoffs, landings and the in-air-lecture-time when airplane attendants try to guilt me into believing I am a bad mother for refusing food trays for myself and my sons.
Later, in the snaking midnight lines of Manila with a whiny young American couple behind us (excuse me, ma’am, sir, we need to jump to the front because our flight is scheduled to leave soon…), quotes fresh from the book replayed in my head.
When the same couple was next to us on our flight to Beijing, the girl took a hiatus from their make-out session to remark on my existence with pity, Look, Dyson, that poor woman with the kids was in the same line we were!
I understood her unspoken epiphany (I thought inching forward for hours was my personal tragedy, but apparently I shared it with preteen kids possessing more stamina than me) and clinked tiny half-cans of Heineken with her.
Arriving in Beijing, 5am, we stumbled around looking for our short-term lodging and openly presented our visages to street cameras, exercising and, I like to think, improving their facial recognition technology. My face is triangular but, importantly, still human.
Finished the book the next day on a slow train, riding instead of flying to the rural spot in Henan we for a short time called “home.”
—
Strange to think of traveling anywhere now, sitting homebound in my hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas, May 6, 2020.
The only upside to our Bad Flight Itinerary of August 2019 was experiencing this book in its natural habitat. ReviewReader, if you continue you will be exposed to an account of said itinerary, and I know if it was me, but not my review, I would appreciate the warning and stop here.
Book selected the morning we left Tokyo, continued in spurts during takeoffs, landings and the in-air-lecture-time when airplane attendants try to guilt me into believing I am a bad mother for refusing food trays for myself and my sons.
Later, in the snaking midnight lines of Manila with a whiny young American couple behind us (excuse me, ma’am, sir, we need to jump to the front because our flight is scheduled to leave soon…), quotes fresh from the book replayed in my head.
When the same couple was next to us on our flight to Beijing, the girl took a hiatus from their make-out session to remark on my existence with pity, Look, Dyson, that poor woman with the kids was in the same line we were!
I understood her unspoken epiphany (I thought inching forward for hours was my personal tragedy, but apparently I shared it with preteen kids possessing more stamina than me) and clinked tiny half-cans of Heineken with her.
Arriving in Beijing, 5am, we stumbled around looking for our short-term lodging and openly presented our visages to street cameras, exercising and, I like to think, improving their facial recognition technology. My face is triangular but, importantly, still human.
Finished the book the next day on a slow train, riding instead of flying to the rural spot in Henan we for a short time called “home.”
—
Strange to think of traveling anywhere now, sitting homebound in my hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas, May 6, 2020.