I think Flights might be a masterpiece. I wanted to read it again as soon as I’d finished it, so I bought a copy – my ultimate approval rating (everything I read comes from the library at the moment).
Like A visit from the goon squad but even less structured, there’s no central narrative or character. Flights is more like a surreal scrapbook, compiled by someone with some rather niche interests, yet Sebald-esque in its beauty and originality (again, the highest praise I can bestow). In the textual vernissage of its 116 sections, there are themes that develop, people who reappear, and stories that are told in instalments; other fragments are unexpected observations, aphorisms and asides, some are text-book like passages on historical matters, some are passages of gorgeous lyrical prose, and how you make sense of it all is up to you, dear reader, which is all very post-modern, and I love it, personally. This literary cabinet of curiosities is curated by a nameless female traveller, in perpetual motion herself, with a thoroughly deadpan Eastern European lack of affect. Amazingly, it does cohere and the end result is astonishing, and I now have to read everything Olga Tokarczuk has ever written.
