“Flights,” by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead), is exciting in the way that unclassifiable things are exciting—that is to say, at times confoundingly so. It is intermittently a work of fiction, but it is also an exercise in theory, cultural anthropology, and memoir. The narrator, an unnamed Polish writer with a hungry eye and an unappeasable need to travel, presents an omnium-gatherum, a big book full of many peculiar parts: there are mini-essays on airports, hotel lobbies, the psychology of travel, guidebooks, the atavistic pleasures of a single Polish word, the aphorisms of E. M. Cioran. Some of these riffs, which themselves tend toward the aphoristic, are as short as a couple of sentences. They are interspersed with longer fictional tales, set all over the world and in different epochs, as if they were found objects and Tokarczuk merely an itinerant gatherer: a Polish man, on a Croatian island for a holiday, searches for his wife and child, who have gone missing; a classics professor, hired as a star lecturer for a Greek cruise, falls on board the boat, and dies in Athens; a Russian mother, long tethered to the care of her severely sick son, walks out of her home and her life, and experiments with a new, perilous existence, riding the Moscow metro and spending time with the homeless; a German doctor, obsessed with body parts (he keeps photographs of vulvae in cardboard boxes), travels to a conference to speak on his paper “The Preservation of Pathology Specimens Through Silicone Plastication.”
The book’s two great themes, twining the fictional and the nonfictional ficelles, are mobility and curiosity. Like her characters, our narrator is always on the move, and is always noticing and theorizing, often brilliantly. Early in “Flights,” she tells us that she is “drawn to all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken,” to “anything that deviates from the norm, that is too small or too big.” Later, she tells us that she loves “Moby-Dick,” a book written out of “a genuine desire to portray the world.” Tokarczuk’s approach, like Melville’s, is encyclopedic and multiform. She turns nothing away. She relishes the sites of mobility—airports, cities, hotels, trains—and all the world’s exemptions, the things that got away: “the unique, the bizarre, the freakish.” These include the living—a woman she meets at the Stockholm airport who is compiling an unfinishable book on every crime ever committed, called “Reports on Infamy”—and the dead: collections of strange specimens, such as fetuses suspended in formaldehyde, relics in St. Vitus Cathedral (“the breasts of St. Anne, totally intact, kept in a glass jar”), Chopin’s heart (an oversized organ removed after his death and preserved in alcohol), or anatomical wax figures at the Josephinum medical museum, in Vienna. Emperor Joseph II, Tokarczuk announces with apparent approval, collected “every manifestation of the aberration of the world” in his “cabinet of curiosities.”
One of the book’s most suggestive micro-essays concerns Wikipedia, which Tokarczuk rightly lauds as a “wonder of the world,” a project to gather the entire globe’s knowledge. Characteristically—because Tokarczuk is herself intellectually mobile—she changes course in the second paragraph of her riff. The problem with Wikipedia is that it can contain only what we can represent in words:
Tokarczuk’s book is a cabinet of curiosities that must also include itself in the cabinet, which means that, formally, “Flights” can’t really hang together, and doesn’t attempt to. It’s a work both modish and antique, apparently postmodern in emphasis but fed by the exploratory energies of the Renaissance. Its literary lineage starts in the classics (sweet-natured, knowledge-rummaging Pliny), goes through Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne, and then winds through Rilke’s diaristic “Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” the freewheeling fictions of Kundera and the magical ones of Calvino, the diaries of Gombrowicz. This mode could be called flâneurial essayism, worldly and hospitable; its motto might be King Lear’s chastened amnesty, “None does offend, none, I say, none.” Curiosity is mobility, in this way of being in the world. Calvino’s Marco Polo enters each city and “sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his.” Tramping through his fields of knowledge, Montaigne, in “Of Repentance,” describes existence as perennial movement: “All things in it are in constant motion. . . . I cannot keep my subject still. . . . I do not portray being: I portray passing.”
Montaigne’s perpetually mobile essays are in search of the palpable realities of life: death, cruelty, joy, warfare, sex, the ethics of parenting, the incoherence of the self. But “Flights” seeks itself—it’s a cabinet of curiosities that is about cabinets of curiosities, a work of cultural tourism about cultural tourism, a series of movements about movement. Here, mobility is in danger of becoming an abstraction, and, because Tokarczuk repeatedly returns to her themes, the ironic effect is of a certain fixity.
“Flights” begins beautifully. The narrator recalls her Polish childhood, and how she was drawn to the River Oder, an example of movement that serves for the rest of the book: “The river flowed on, parading, concerned only with its hidden aims beyond the horizon, somewhere far off to the north . . . those changing, roving waters into which—as I later learned—you can never step twice.” (The supple English makes the translation, by Jennifer Croft, look to have been easy, which it surely cannot have been.) The narrator, whose parents appear to have had deep roots in the country, a traditional existence punctuated only by annual vacations, tells us that she is thrilled by her unmoored existence: “I can’t extract nutrition from the ground, I am the anti-Antaeus. My energy derives from movement—from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.”
Yet this will to wander, so appealing when it belongs to a specific narrator, gradually stiffens into dogma when dispersed in the text. Tokarczuk tells us that whenever she travels she happily “falls off the radar”; no one knows where she is. In any airport, she muses, there must be a lot of people like her, people who “start to exist when the immigration officers stamp their passports. . . . Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness—these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized. Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.” Guidebooks, she fears, have “ruined the greater part of the planet,” partly because they contaminate this in-betweenness, this liminality, with the lead anchor of consumerist description. Later still, Tokarczuk has a couple of specialists in “travel psychology” announce, like hired expert witnesses, that “if we wish to catalog humankind in a convincing way, we can do so only by placing people in some sort of motion,” for “constellation, not sequencing, carries truth.” And, in the book’s most emphatic sermon, a homeless Russian seer—encountered by the Russian mother on her journeys through Moscow—delivers the equivalent of Captain Ahab’s on-deck monologue. “Sway, go on, move,” the seer inveighs. “He who rules the world has no power over movement and knows that our body in motion is holy. . . . This is why tyrants of all stripes . . . have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads—this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews. . . . Blessed is he who leaves.”
This is an ethics, a politics, and, finally, a theology of mobility. You can understand why a Polish author, growing up with relatively little freedom to travel abroad, living what one of her characters describes as a “rotten, claustrophobic northern life in that absurd, unfriendly communist country of the late sixties,” might divide the world into happy free mobility on one side, and unhappy totalitarian fixity on the other. Kundera has also used sex and laughter as ecstatic slayers of a frozen political order. But these days Tokarczuk’s binarism sounds too close to easy campus wisdom, to postmodern piety, even to neoliberal commerce: leaving is good, staying is bad; deracination is expansive, rootedness is dangerous. We have become comfortable inheritors of what Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity.” But is mobility always a good, always a predicate of freedom? I can imagine a book that cogently argues the opposite. Classical realism is sometimes accused of effacing its own literary labor; the cost of Tokarczuk’s flâneurial freedom is that it effaces the labor of travel. The unnamed, always single author, a sovereign self blissfully off the radar and with nothing to do but write in her notebook, moves with her repose undisturbed through arenas marked by the spoliation of mass tourism but rarely notices that vast, cheap mass movement, which of course includes her own easy transits. (The flâneuse always tends to exempt herself from the general condition.) And what of those large groups of people, the world’s unwanted, who would rather not be on the move, who would dearly love to stay rooted, and who had “started to exist” long before they left their country for somewhere else? It’s sometimes hard to ignore the fact that the novel was written more than a decade ago, before the current European crises. (It does not contain the word “migrant” or “refugee.”)
“Flights,” as intelligently openhearted and sharp-eyed as it is, is sometimes prone to whitewash even the First World travel experience: flight attendants are rapturously seen as “beautiful as angels,” and airports are described as having their own symphonic soundtrack, “a requiem that opens with the potent introitus of takeoff and closes with an amen descending into landing.” (Tell that to those unfortunates living near the airport in their unsellable houses.) Planes are conjured up as magically sterile spaces: “The plane is suspended in this clear, frosty air that kills bacteria. Every flight disinfects us. Every night cleanses us completely.” (Well, perhaps in business class).
Because Tokarczuk is such a talented redescriber of the world, the book is at its best not in the ozone of abstraction but when it registers, as it so often does, particularities closer to the earth. Her discerning eye shakes things up, in the same way that her book scrambles conventional forms. Looking at a map of Greece, the narrator notices how beautiful the shape of the Peloponnese is: “the shape of a great maternal hand, not a human one, that is dipping into the water to check if the temperature is right for a bath.” There’s a witty entry about how the sleeper train is really just a “train for cowards,” a dormitory for those afraid to fly; and a marvellous account of insomnia in a hotel room, where the narrator flicks between TV channels—“You hold the remote out like a weapon, and you take shots at the very center of the screen. Each shot kills one channel, but then another follows directly on its heels.”
Her theoretical and dialectical experiments are at their richest when tied to local detail. She notices that airports have become almost self-sufficient cities, with promenades, gardens, shopping malls, and meditation rooms, and wonders whether cities may come to supplement their airports, rather than the usual way round. There is an entry, delivered with perfect ironic poise, about how unhappy people who speak no language other than English must be:
Among the most moving of such apparently glancing but gently profound noticings is a single paragraph about a single Polish word. The narrator, walking in some unnamed place “along the steep banks of the ocean among the sharp leaves of yuccas,” rests in a shelter, where there is a guestbook, inscribed by the travellers who have come this way. The narrator’s eye is caught by a name and address: “Świebodzin, Poland.” She says the name out loud: “That funny, difficult name, against which the undisciplined tongue rebels, that soft, perverse ś that immediately brings a vague sensation, something like cold oilcloth spread over the kitchen table, a basket of freshly plucked tomatoes from the country garden, the smell of the fumes from the gas stove. It all combines to make Świebodzin the only real thing. There’s nothing else.”
Those sections saturated in the author’s Polishness are the most poignant and meaningful in the book. The cabinet of curiosities, glittering with all kinds of marvels, is just to be browsed; the travelling reader moves through it and past it. But, like the author, we snag on that Polish word, and its suggestion of cold oilcloth, garden tomatoes, and stove fumes. Such episodes deliberately complicate the book’s exaltation of mobility and its freedoms. We might see the book’s lovely, intransigent Polishness as akin to the author’s idea of the anti-Wikipedia. Chopin’s heart is information, which anyone can possess; a memory of stove fumes is not information but a particular, personal memory, which is likely to prompt one of our own. There is the utopian theory of mobility and endless curiosity, and there is our daily reality, which is composed of a billion familiar details, most of them indescribable—the rooms we sit in, and the dimmer rooms we were once raised in; the streets we live on, and the old streets we grew up on, which truly exist now only in our heads. There is the desirable horizon, but there is also the furrowed field, which we know so well and which has made us who we are.
The book opens with a vivid evocation of the Oder River and its endless, Heraclitean possibilities but is anchored by an equally vivid evocation of a fixed Polish world: “the park, the greenhouses with their vegetables that grew in sad little rows, and the sidewalk with its concrete slabs where we would go to play hopscotch. . . . The hairdresser on the main square by the Town Hall was always there in the same apron, washed and bleached in vain because the clients’ hair dye left stains like calligraphy, like Chinese characters.” Later in “Flights,” in a kind of fictional reply to this overture, Tokarczuk offers a fictionalized story about a Polish woman who, after many years abroad, makes a long journey back home, to help a terminally ill former boyfriend end his life. It is one of the most affecting episodes in the book, and, once again, the remembered Polish details arrest the reader: “Their secondary school was a chilly old building where on two floors classrooms multiplied inside the broad hallways. . . . Boards covered in dark green rubber that could be moved up and down. One of the kids would be put in charge of moistening the sponge before each class.” When the woman eventually arrives in Poland, she goes to the dying man’s room. Her former lover makes a joke about the drip he is getting intravenously: breakfast, lunch, and dinner combined—“Pork chops and cabbage, apple pie and beer for dessert.” Tokarczuk adds, “Quietly she repeats after him the word for ‘cabbage,’ kapusta, a word she had all but forgotten, and it is enough to make her hungry.” And the reader, too. ♦
