For book number 15 (1/5th of the way through the project), I was given the choice of:
‘Flights’ by Olga Tokarczuk
‘A Prayer for Owen Meany’ by John Irving
‘Red Mars’ by Kim Stanley Robinson
I decided to go for the most recent book that was to offer, as well as being an International Man Booker Prize winner – ‘Flights’ by Olga Tokarczuk.
Goodreads summary: A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. 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. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveller, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveller. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.
There are certain books that, whilst you can admire the quality of the writing and the scope of the ideas presented, just don’t resonate with you. Tokarczuk is clearly a very gifted writer and I could understand why someone might absolutely love what she served up in ‘Flights’, but it never fully gripped me like some books do. It had its moments, but all too often it felt like a fragmented slog.
‘Flights’ is interesting in terms of its structure because it reads like a series of small extracts that occasionally give way to longer set pieces. Ostensibly, we follow the main protagonist in her journeys – hence the name ‘Flights’ – which then spark off into longer narratives away from the narrator that tend to explore ideas around movement or travel. There also is a consistent focus on the body, mainly explored through stories about the plastination or dissection of bodies. Outside of being interesting narratives that allow for some long form pieces to hold the book together as a whole, I’ll freely admit to not entirely getting the link.
When the book is good, it is very good. Some of the brief asides about travel and the world of airports in particular are humorous, shared moments of understanding between the author and the reader. Alongside this, some of the longer chapters present interesting slices of life. Particular favourites for me included a woman travelling to see a dying ex-partner, as well as an aging man who gives lectures on cruises as seen through the eyes of his wife, looking beyond to a future when he no longer is apart of it.
Indeed, there is a fascination with life, aging and death that does occasionally engage, but the lack of cohesion hurts the narrative, if there indeed is one. It just seems to meander from place to place, artfully and stylishly I’m sure to some, but losing any sense of power in whatever message Tokarczuk was trying to convey – again, if there is one. Therein lies the problem: if I’m leaving a book and I’m left with a lot of ‘why?’ or ‘what?’ questions, most notably ‘why was this written?’ and ‘what was the point?’, it doesn’t bode well.
What carries this novel to an average rating rather than outright panning is that Tokarczuk is clearly a very skilled writer. I could only wish to have her ease and control of language, which feels adeptly translated into English by her translator. However, being a good writer and writing a good book are two very separate things, and this is ultimately where the disconnect comes for me.
Scaling the TBR Pile 