Best Read in Transit ✈️

Olga Tokarczuk's Flights is ideally read while traveling—it's perfectly suited for the liminal spaces of airports and hotel lobbies. It's a bit hard to describe, as it doesn't have a through plot, or characters as we normally understand them. Instead we get fragments—narratives about modern people in unusual situations, stories of historical figures, philosophical musings, discourse on travel and its discontents.

Deceptively Easy, Quietly Profound

Attempting to explain it makes it sound rather dreary and serious—but it is actually quite easy to read, in turns thoughtful, humorous, unsettling, meditative, and poetic. There are some recurrent themes: anatomy, migration, disillusionment, isolation, and despite all, beauty.

The Coordinates of Meaning

Here's a passage I particularly liked (among many):

Many people believe that there exists in the world’s coordinate system a perfect point where time and space reach an agreement. This may even be why these people travel, leaving their homes behind, hoping that even by moving around in a chaotic fashion they will increase their likelihood of happening upon this point. Landing at the right time in the right place – seizing the opportunity, grabbing the moment and not letting go – would mean the code to the safe has been cracked, the combination revealed, the truth exposed. No more being passed by, no more surfing coincidences, accidents and turns of fate. You don’t have to do anything – you just have to show up, sign in at that one single configuration of time and place. There you will find your great love, happiness, a winning lottery ticket or the revelation of the mystery everyone’s been killing themselves over in vain for all these years, or death. Sometimes in the morning one even has the impression that this moment is close by, that today might be the day it will arrive.

Fragments Worth the Flight

If this sample is to your taste, explore this unclassifiable and entirely original book for more, much more: Chopin's heart being illicitly carried to Poland, a man unravelling after an inexplicable incident involving his wife and young child, a retired professor giving lectures on a luxury cruise around the Greek islands, a Russian mother abandoning her young son and taking up a perilous existence on the streets, a Dutch anatomist studying the Achilles tendon...

About Me

Laura LaVelle is Wonder Shuffle's Culture Editor. A fan of the great indoors, you can find her in her native NYC, her home in Connecticut, or at a concert, play, library, bookstore, or museum just about anywhere in the world.

NOVEL: Flights

AUTHOR: Olga Tokarczuk

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2007

ENGLISH TRANSLATION: Jennifer Croft, 2017

IMAGE: book cover, Riverhead Books