Ultimately it was a place that, despite reconstruction, still belonged to the dead. I never felt comfortable there between the new communist buildings and the wretched squares there was always a wind, and the frosty air was particularly bitter, stinging you in the face. That part of the city had been built up on the ruins of the ghetto, which you could tell if you took a good look – that whole neighbourhood stood about three feet higher than the rest of the town. My department was located in a building that had been the headquarters of an S.S. 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.I studied psychology in a big, gloomy communist city.
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. In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin's heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw. 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. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration.
FLIGHTS, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk's most ambitious to date.
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