Departure Lounge

A category-defying novel about the merits of movement.

- James Wood

“Flights,” by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead), is ex­ citing 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 narra­ tor, 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 mini­essays on airports, hotel lobbies, the psychol­ogy of travel, guidebooks, the atavis­ tic 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 inter­ spersed 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 miss­ ing; 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.”