Review and Interview by Gina Jelinski + Jonah Lipton
The ecstasy we experienced while reading Flights was, at first, tempered by a mild sense of frustration. Over the course of episodes that span decades, continents, and genres, it isn’t always clear how everything fits together. It isn’t obvious how an anatomist’s search for a means of preserving the human body relates to a tour guide telling fairy tales to a herd of voyagers, or how these and other stories relate to the maps and diagrams sprinkled throughout the novel. But our appetite for these humble accounts held us captive.
As the enchantment commenced, we realized that Olga had written the type of book that we so longed to read. It was as if we were right beside the narrator, or that rather, she was inside our own heads; reminding us of the pleasures and pains of being an observer. Terrifying, vulnerable, dense, thoroughly saturated with object-affection and dismembered bodies, blood transfusion politics, shampoo ads, plane food, a singer’s gesture at a funeral mass for Chopin, cursing in Polish at a video rental shop, a mercy killing, honeysuckle straight to the sea, a letter from Josefine to the Emperor of Austria… various encounters etched into time illustrate decades of loneliness.
But Flights is more than just a compendium of existential crises; these fragmented tales felt to us like scientific case studies that Tokarczuk trusted us to decipher. We were seduced by this methodology, led to believe that these may be musings on the philosophical topography of Olga’s frightening kraina czarów (wonderland). Remnants of the author’s time as a clinical psychologist seep through the pages. “Too far from what, too near to what?” mumbles the narrator in one of Tokarczuk’s painfully enigmatic chapters. Each character represents our desperation to belong while disregarding one’s place, simultaneously mapping nostalgia and inheriting doubt.
Stay longer. Time to depart. Why had I left? Why had I returned? In the last hundred pages of Tokarczuk’s novel, during one of many airplane rides, the narrator finds a handwritten message on the back of an unused barf bag in the seat-pocket in front of her: “10/12/2006: Striking out for Ireland. Final destination Belfast. Students of the Rzeszów Institute of Technology.” Like the reader of Flights, the narrator glimpses a story in this collection of departures and intended arrivals, even if she is left to imagine for herself the psychological terrain this journey entails. It is the sentiment behind this letter (and behind Tokarczuk’s book) that binds us to these characters: a desire for connection, for our journeys to have an audience, for our loneliness to find a home in the collective, unyielding pilgrimage.
A Breif Interview with Olga Tokarczuk
Our interview with Olga Tokarczuk was conducted over email. Jennifer Croft, the translator of Flights, also translated both sides of our conversation:
Jonah & Gina: While reading Flights, it became clear to us how so many disparate narrative threads are actually in careful conversation with one another. Do you remember which of these strands came to you first and affected you most deeply? And, how did the order in which you wrote each section relate to the way they appear in Flights?
Olga Tokarczuk: I thought of all the connections and associations in the book in engineering terms: bolts, joints, gearwheels, rivets. I knew they wouldn’t be visible to the reader, but also that they needed to ensure that the whole structure of the text would be internally stable. The first thing was the opposition between the world and its motion to the body, memory, death and the pursuit of immortality. That’s why that juxtaposition happens on other levels, as well, as in the appearances by Copernicus and Vesalius. That’s the main axis of the book. It may come as a surprise, but I wrote most of the book’s parts in order. There were only a few sections that had to be rearranged in the final version.
J&G: What is the first section you gravitate toward when you visit a library or bookstore?
OT: Sale books! And after that psychology and religion.
J&G: You write that tyrants “want to create a frozen order, to falsify time’s passage.” Can you compare this enforced stasis to writing? In what ways do you think writing can work for or against this tyranny?
OT: I think that because literature is always seeking new points of view and always telling ancient stories afresh it keeps our minds curious, restless, ready to react and ask questions. Thanks to it we see the world in motion, and that’s the only version of the world that’s true. Nothing unsettles tyrants more than the idea that anything can happen.
J&G: What keeps you in motion, Olga?
OT: Plans, people, trips and all the things that demand writing.
J&G: What about a place keeps you still?
OT: Nature, especially my country garden.
J&G: We were interested in what other jobs you’ve taken inspiration from, aside from clinical psychology, that you might you want to reveal to us?
OT: Whenever I write books I study in great detail what I intend to describe. Often my characters have strange occupations. In House of Day, House of Night, the protagonist makes wigs, and when it came time to show this in the book, I went to this workshop where they make wigs and learned every detail of the process with great precision. It was similar with Flights–I studied the whole history of anatomy and the preservation of tissues, went to Amsterdam with that goal. Of course only a small fraction of what I learn makes it into the book. But that kind of research brings enormous pleasure. That might actually be the most pleasurable part of writing, that unhampered study of something that really fascinates you.
J&G: What objects do you take along with you during your own travels?
OT: I don’t take anything special with me, but I do collect little things along the way: pieces of brick, pebbles, pine cones, seeds. That way I think I make my own travels real to myself, by collecting evidence that I was there. That’s something the internet will never be able to do.
—Originally published for Book Soup