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A review by savvylit
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
The fragmented nature of Flights made it a more difficult, time-consuming read for me than the books I usually gravitate towards. Reading this felt like reading an art piece. I saw Flights described somewhere as a collage and I think that's incredibly accurate. Flights is a collage of short stories, letters, journal entries, maps, and ruminations. Just when you're invested in what happens to the characters in one of the many vignettes, it's over and you find yourself at a paragraph about the validity of guidebooks. The sudden changes of pace often felt jarring and disjointed and were what made Flights a bit of a slog for me.
My favorite thing about the book, though, is how evocative it is of the anonymity of international travel. There were so many segments of this book that took me back to my own travels and the very specific feeling that you belong nowhere and everywhere at once. Transit stations and airports truly have a liminal quality that I've never seen captured as well as Tokarczuk has in Flights.
My least favorite thing about the book was the pages on pages describing plastination. I am just not at all interested in the methods used during / the art form of preserving anatomical specimens. There was a point in my reading where I thought I would go insane if I read one more description detailing the composition of a preserved human body part.
Ultimately, I picked this book to read after Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead became one of my favorite books of 2021. In Flights, Tokarczuk's prose is still as exceptional as I found it to be in DYPOBD. However, the two books could not be more different! Which is perfectly alright, just not what I'd initially hoped for. I think I just really wanted to read another Toakrczuk book that followed a more traditional narrative structure. Alas.
My favorite thing about the book, though, is how evocative it is of the anonymity of international travel. There were so many segments of this book that took me back to my own travels and the very specific feeling that you belong nowhere and everywhere at once. Transit stations and airports truly have a liminal quality that I've never seen captured as well as Tokarczuk has in Flights.
My least favorite thing about the book was the pages on pages describing plastination. I am just not at all interested in the methods used during / the art form of preserving anatomical specimens. There was a point in my reading where I thought I would go insane if I read one more description detailing the composition of a preserved human body part.
Ultimately, I picked this book to read after Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead became one of my favorite books of 2021. In Flights, Tokarczuk's prose is still as exceptional as I found it to be in DYPOBD. However, the two books could not be more different! Which is perfectly alright, just not what I'd initially hoped for. I think I just really wanted to read another Toakrczuk book that followed a more traditional narrative structure. Alas.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Medical content, and Injury/Injury detail