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 βThe Preservation of Pathology Specimens Through Silicone Plastication.β Some of these riffs, which themselves tend toward the aphoristic, are as short as a couple of sentences. 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. It is intermittently a work of fiction, but it is also an exercise in theory, cultural anthropology, and memoir. β Flights,β 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.
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