This is a book that demands a lot of mental work and, at slightly more than 400 pages, a considerable time investment. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.
Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler.
Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. Its innovative use of free indirect discourse produces a perspective that, while appearing to be a single voice, contains multiple, contradictory points of view.From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. The novel subtly demonstrates the impossibility of such efforts, but, the essay argues, Books of Jacob continues this project, albeit from the opposite direction, examining the affordances of the third‐person voice. In Flights, the narrator's striving to arrive at a more expansive and synthetic knowledge of the world is accompanied by an effort to go beyond the first‐person voice, to a broader perspective.
Both novels investigate the challenges inherent in the project of providing an image of the world, and alongside various interventions on the level of content, each examines the kind of world‐image that different approaches to narrative voice can produce. This essay argues for the power of free indirect discourse in the third‐person narrative perspective to serve as a collective voice, encompassing a diversity of perspectives, through a reading of two novels by Olga Tokarczuk, Bieguni ( Flights) and Księgi Jakubowe ( Books of Jacob).
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