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Flights
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Flights
Unavailable
Flights
Audiobook12 hours

Flights

Written by Olga Tokarczuk

Narrated by Julia Whelan

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

A visionary work of fiction with "echoes of Sebald [and] Kundera . . . [There's] no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times" (The Guardian).

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 traveler, 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 traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller's answer.

Editor's Note

Nobel Prize winner…

Author Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 (announced in October 2019) for what the Swedish Academy calls “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Her novel “Flights” is a philosophical read with a focus on travel, more invested in sharing the disparate stories of dozens of people than on following the exploits of one central protagonist.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 14, 2018
ISBN9780525626954
Unavailable
Flights
Author

Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk, una de las mejores y más celebradas escritoras polacas actuales, ha recibido el Premio Nobel de Literatura 2018, otorgado en 2019, y ha sido galardonada con premios como el Brueckepreis o el Nike, el más prestigioso de los que se conceden en su país. Autora de nueve novelas y tres libros de relatos, sus obras se han traducido a cuarenta y cinco lenguas y le han valido el reconocimiento de colegas como Annie Proulx («Una escritora del nivel de W. G. Sebald») o Svetlana Alexiévich («Una escritora magnífica»). En Anagrama ha publicado Un lugar llamado Antaño: «Tokarczuk se muestra tan hábil en la creación de personajes como en la articulación de la trama, creando un universo donde los hechos están salpicados de refl exiones filosófi cas y explosiones de lirismo» (Rafael Narbona, El Mundo); Los errantes, Premio Man Booker Internacional 2018 y finalista del National Book Award en la categoría de libros traducidos: «Un hermoso libro sobre la necesidad de traspasar fronteras para saber algo más de nosotros mismos» (Rafael Narbona, El Mundo); «Una novela-constelación» (Marta Rebón, El País); «Libro fascinante, sin género» (Mercedes Monmany, ABC); «Un libro inagotable» (Domingo Ródenas de Moya, El Periódico); «Tal vez estemos ante el mejor libro de viajes jamás escrito» (Antonio Lozano, La Vanguardia); «Un mosaico vibrante de historias» (Pablo Martínez Zarracina, El Correo); «Una gran y gozosa lectura» (Santiago Aizarna, El Diario Vasco) y Los libros de Jacob:«Una obra que pide ser leída en los mismos términos que Guerra y paz» (Tim Smith-Laing, The Telegraph).

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Reviews for Flights

Rating: 3.81557131147541 out of 5 stars
4/5

122 ratings8 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft.Motion! Keep moving - that’s the very explicit message in Flights, Olga Tokarczuk’s fascinating and highly praised 2007 novel. Stand still and The Man will co-opt you, pin you down like an insect in a case, and sentence you to servitude in hell. Keep moving and you have half a chance at wisdom, at beauty, at happiness. In 2018, this English translation won the Man Booker International Prize. The book deserves it, beyond doubt.Flights consists of more than a hundred segments of widely varying lengths. The novel’s framework slowly becomes clear, and while only a few narrative threads recur to be updated, these are few and set out quite obliquely. Ms. Tokarczuk sets out for our consideration 17th Century practices in preserving corpses, with brilliant scenes of the busy anatomists’ operating room theaters. In an early thematic statement, the author asks, isn’t it wrong that we die? Shouldn’t we be able to preserve our bodies in perpetuity? The scenes set in 17th Century Holland bring us up close and personal to the first scientists to preserve flesh in any effective way. We return to this motif several times throughout the book, able to follow modernizations in technique along the way.Other segments contain observations of various details and impressions of 21st Century travel: how people behave on planes; a certain universality of hotel rooms; a nervous note written on the bottom of an air sickness bag years ago; the design of airports. I don’t know if it’s actually the case in airports around the world, but in Flights, specialists - therapists and advanced students - give lectures in airport hallways about the psychology of travel. Mostly these lectures are only spottily attended or heeded - we and our author-guide are included in the crowd that doesn’t pay attention.But: just past halfway through the narrative we meet Annushka, a disaffected housewife in Moscow. With a hopeless and restricting family life, she flees her predicament during her mother-in-law’s weekly visit. She takes to riding Moscow’s metro, finding a secluded corner to sleep in when the trains shut down for the night. A few days into this life, she encounters a mysterious woman, a vagrant clothed in multiple layers, even her face is hidden. She stands in a station hollering invective at whomever passes. Most of it is unintelligible, but Annushka eventually approaches her and, after spooking her at first, engages her in a halting conversation, fueled by the meals Annushka buys for her.She learns the woman’s name is Galena, and Galena lives by the code of keeping moving. In her addled, outcast way, Galena serves as the Oracle of this story. At page 258 et seq, in a section called “What the Shrouded Runaway Was Saying,” the enterprising author spells out one main theme of the novel. In it we learn that the body in motion is holy and cannot be pinned down to an accounted-for, prefabricated, predestined life. If you keep moving, you will be saved from the inhuman government’s cataloging, its endless need for strict order and adherence, birth to the grave. A quote from this poetic exhortation:“So go, away, walk, run, take flight, because the second you forget and stand still, his massive hands will seize you and turn you into a puppet, you’ll be enveloped in his breath, stinking of smoke and fumes and the big trash dumps outside town. He will turn your brightly colored soul into a tiny flat one, cut out of paper, of newspaper, and he will threaten you with fire, disease, and war, he will scare you so you lose your peace of mind and cease to sleep.”We also read of a family whose arc exists in multiple segments, far apart in the book. While on vacation on the Adriatic, the man’s wife disappears with their small son for several days. This disappearance lasts a few days, but the man feels he cannot get a straight answer from his wife about it. He hounds her for months with his single-minded questions until finally she flies for good and takes her son with her. So, one cannot or should not become too literal in looking for reasons for flight. They are obvious and many, but sometimes unnamable. Whatever the reasons for the woman’s first sojourn away from her husband, eventually he drove her off permanently.An unusual reading experience, this. We go along section by section, anticipating that a narrative will emerge, but we must content ourselves with a very slow and oblique unfolding. The main body of the story keeps us definitely in the present day: the rhythms and sights and smells and emotions of modern travel are all too familiar. Longer segments pop vividly up, with their more orthodox story lines, like advances in the preservation of human flesh, and two separate stories of women running from their homes and their oppressive family situations.By and by, the images and the lessons gel into clarity: flight is sacred, natural, and necessary. The seeming randomness in the segments supports the thesis: the flesh of humans who have been preserved for display or exemplifies the pinning-down of people stationary in perpetuity. The more orthodox stories show people on the move for reasons of self-preservation, and the first-person narrator herself is constantly traveling around the world. It’s a wide-ranging novel, appropriately, and achieves its overarching thesis beautifully. Take it up and enjoy it. It’s unique, compelling, a deserving prize winner.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Once again I find myself bogged down in trying to makes sense of a nonlinear work of fiction. Perhaps this type of writing is the newest version of the "novel", but I find I gravitate to either facts or stories. The author says in an interview that she had all the bits & pieces on the floor and settled upon the perfect arrangement, all seemed rather random to me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Olga Tokarczuk describes Flights (original Polish title 'Bieguni', after a religious sect who believed that the only way to escape the power of the Antichrist was to avoid stability) as a 'constellation novel', in which a myriad of seemingly un- or only tangentially related stories, essays and sketches are cast into orbit, allowing the reader’s imagination to form them into meaningful shapes. A magnificent novel.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book makes you feel that you are following the author’s thoughts in various life situations, for example while traveling or encountering someone.
    While I don’t have a problem with plotless books, this one was dry. I would find from time to time a nice description or a smart thought, but those moments were too rare when compared with the expectations raised by how acclaimed the author is.
    I expected the fragments or part of those to connect somehow, when that did not happen, further in the book I thought to consider each text like a letter, individually , but that did not work either...So much effort for so little literary satisfaction. I guess this book was just a preparatory stage for OT, for other novels. I can’t say, I did not read any of her other work yet.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Series of loosely connected vignettes about traveling and the human body. There are few stories here. It is extremely fragmented. This structure will appeal to some readers and turn off others. I found myself wondering the point of it all. There are a few philosophical musings that are somewhat interesting, but taken as a whole, this is just not my type of book. I prefer a storyline with a cohesive flow. It probably will work better for readers who enjoy experimental fiction.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Some interesting stories, well written and some pretty boring, especially body preservatiuon items...too many!!!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    At first sight, this is an idea for a book so crazy that you are inclined to suspect that it could have been the result of a silly party game — after the third bottle of wine has gone round the writer gets her friends to write down things that could be subjects for a parody of the postmodern novel, and, suitably blindfolded, she draws out "air travel", "museums of anatomical specimens" and "old maps"......but of course that's unfair. Whatever the method that led her to pick these particular themes, Tokarczuk knows what she's doing, and she stitches them into a complex but very satisfying whole, using a mixture of first-person observation in the persona of the author, fragments of fictional stories, and historical anecdotes, illustrated in a pleasingly incoherent way by a selection of old and slightly offbeat maps of places that mostly don't have anything obvious to do with the text. Some things work better than others: the whole flight=fugue, arrival=death, aircraft=womb (etc.) thing has been done by so many other people, and the last part of the book almost reads like a rehash of Tennyson's "Ulysses". But she does manage to keep our attention, even there, and she does a lot of unexpected things with the other major thread about anatomical exhibitions and tissue-preservation (parts of which are also quite well-trodden ground for postmodern writers). And she's simply such a good writer in detail as well: wherever we are in the book there are unexpected images and pieces of observation to make us go back and read a passage again, with even more pleasure than the first time.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an excellent Polish novel. It’s thoroughly modern and engaging and reflects the mobility and transience of our contemporary life. The frame for it is travelling, airports, different places around the globe- unnamed yet recognizable and sometimes as just nowhere in particular yet everywhere at the same time. The structure is fragmentary- short, few page long snippets, images, fragments of narration of accidental meetings of fellow travellers, their stories, stories connected to particular places. The structure reflects the fragmentary nature of our experience, boundless curiosity pushing us forward to new places, seeking what? Immortality? Staying forever young? Better life? Or, is it just wanderlust? Difficult to tell. Also difficult to tell if it’s fiction or non-fiction, or what genre it is. There is no good translation of the title. Bieguni can be translated as runners, or it can be translated as pilgrims. The title is borrowed from the name of an Orthodox Christian sect whose members tried to avoid evil by moving about and changing places.