Olga Tokarczuk, _Flights_, trans. Jennifer Croft

FLIGHTS IS A novel, but one could imagine it a collection of short stories, a collection that varies widely in character and setting but tightly coheres thematically. What makes it feel like a novel is that sandwiched between the 20-30 page "short stories" are dozens of vignettes drawn from observations and reflections from the author's travels, observations and reflections that provide a kind of foil for the themes of the fictions. The structure reminded me a lot of major-phase Kundera (Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Unbearable Lightness of Being). Like Kundera, Tokarczuk toggles very adeptly from the essayistic to the fictional to create a sturdy double helix out of her two strands.

Again like Kundera, Tokarczuk gives the book a philosophical center--one reminiscent of Unbearable Lightness, actually, since it addresses the question of whether life is best lived by seeking a kind of gravity or permanence--staying put, preserving, repeating, and so on--or rather by flight, getting out, packing light, risking the new and unfamiliar.

Tokarczuk seems to lean towards the "getting out" answer. The recurring image for achieving stability is mummification, suggesting that permanence requires some form of death. (Kundera might have made the contest more evenly matched.)

It's a beautiful book, nonetheless. The pace is quick, since many of the first-person passages are very short, but it takes a while for the big picture to emerge, mosaic-like, from the many little bits and pieces we are presented with. Once it does, though, we are in high-flying territory. Here is one striking passage, from one of the more developed and clearly fictional episodes. A woman has run away from her abusive husband, abandoning her son, to live homeless in a nearby city. A mysterious figure whispers this to her:

"For anything that has a stable place in this world--every country, church, every human government, everything that has preserved a form in this hell--is at his [i.e., the Antichrist's] command. Everything that is defined, that spans from here to there, that fits into a framework, is written down in registers, numbered, testified to, sworn to, everything collected, displayed, labeled. [...] Get out of here, go far away, beyond  the reach of his breath, beyond his cables and wires and antennas and waves, resist the measurements of his sensitive instruments."