Olga Tokarczuk

Flights

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Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2018.

Flights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk’s most ambitious to date. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration.

From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death.

In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin’s heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw.

In the present we have the trials of a wife accompanying her much older husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, and the harrowing story of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish on a holiday on a Croatian island.

With her signature grace and insight, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind.
This book is currently unavailable
437 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2017
Publication year
2017
Translator
Jennifer Croft
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Impressions

  • olgaprudnshared an impression6 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    🔮Hidden Depths

    I love it)

  • Maria Mirabellashared an impression6 years ago
    🐼Fluffy

Quotes

  • Анна Разумоваhas quoted3 years ago
    I realized that – in spite of all the risks involved – a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence
  • Dulapinzhas quoted4 years ago
    My spatial reasoning is particularly advanced, almost eidetic, though my laterality is lousy. Personality unstable, or not entirely reliable. Age all in your mind. Gender grammatical. I actually buy my books in paperback, so that I can leave them without remorse on the platform, for someone else to find. I don’t collect anything.
  • aniberryhas quoted5 years ago
    What a methodology! It is tacitly assumed that people don’t know themselves, but that if you furnish them with questions that are smart enough, they’ll be able to figure themselves out. They pose themselves a question, and they give themselves an answer. And they’ll inadvertently reveal to themselves that secret they knew nothing of till now.
    And there is that other assumption, which is terribly dangerous – that we are constant, and that our reactions can be predicted

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