Flights by Olga Tokarczuk Review: A Category-Defying Masterwork of Motion

Flights (Polish: Bieguni, literally "runners") is a fragmentary novel, originally written in Polish and first published in 2007. The English translation by Jennifer Croft was published by Riverhead Books. The Polish title alludes to the bieguni, a sect of Old Believers who hold that remaining in constant motion is the only way to elude evil — a philosophy that doubles as the book's animating principle. The novel is structured as 116 short pieces, some only a single sentence long, others stretching to 31 pages. All are narrated by the same nameless female traveller, a Polish writer whose restless eye drives both the fiction and the reflection. As Kirkus Reviews notes, it is "not a novel exactly" and "not even a collection of intertwined short stories" — it is, more precisely, a series of fragments tenuously held together by the idea of travel, through space and through time.

The book ranges across centuries and continents. Longer embedded narratives include the story of Kunicki, a Polish man on a Croatian island holiday whose wife and child vanish — and then reappear; a classics professor who accepts a lecturing post on a Greek cruise and dies in Athens after a fall; a Russian mother, long bound to caring for a severely ill son, who abruptly walks out and takes up a fugitive existence riding the Moscow metro; and a German doctor who travels to a conference to present a paper on the preservation of pathological specimens through silicone plastication. Alongside these fictional strands sit non-fictional vignettes: the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen's investigation of the achilles tendon, and the journey of Ludwika Jędrzejewicz — sister of composer Frédéric Chopin — transporting her brother's preserved heart back to Warsaw. The New Yorker's James Wood describes the book's two great themes as "mobility and curiosity," twining through both the fictional and non-fictional threads. The narrator is drawn, she tells the reader early on, to "all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken" — to "anything that deviates from the norm, that is too small or too big."

The English translation of Flights won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 — the first time the prize went to a Polish author — with Tokarczuk and Croft sharing the £50,000 award. The judging panel's chair, Lisa Appignanesi, called Tokarczuk "a writer of wonderful wit, imagination, and literary panache." In Poland, the original Polish edition had already won the Nike Award, the country's highest literary honour, in 2008. Critical comparisons have placed Tokarczuk's prose in the company of W. G. Sebald, Milan Kundera, and László Krasznahorkai — writers known for blending essayistic digression with narrative and for resisting the conventions of the realist novel. Kirkus Reviews called the book "a welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature," and critics described it as "extraordinary" and "a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness."

The book's greatest strength is its formal ambition matched by genuine intellectual range. Tokarczuk — in addition to being a fiction writer — is an essayist, a psychologist, and a committed public intellectual, and all of those registers are present on the page. The New Yorker notes that the narrator, always on the move, is "always noticing and theorizing, often brilliantly," and that Tokarczuk's approach, like Melville's in Moby-Dick, is "encyclopedic and multiform." Kirkus points out that the book is far from dry or didactic: Tokarczuk's sly humour surfaces throughout, including in the book's self-aware opening gesture — a riff on Borges — that signals the kind of literary playfulness readers will encounter across the whole. Parul Sehgal of critical coverage characterised the narrator as "coolly evasive in the way of Rachel Cusk's heroine in the Outline trilogy," a comparison that captures how the book generates momentum and intimacy without conventional plot anchors.

For all its brilliance, Flights asks something substantial of its readers. The New Yorker's James Wood observed that the book risks "mobility becoming an abstraction," and that because Tokarczuk repeatedly returns to her themes, "the ironic effect is of a certain fixity" — the form meant to enact restlessness can, at its most recursive, feel static. The 116 fragments vary widely in weight and development: some are fully realised narratives, while others are aphorisms or micro-essays that function more as atmospheric texture than story. Readers who come to Flights expecting a conventional novel — with a sustained plot, identified protagonists, or linear resolution — will find themselves on unfamiliar ground. The book rewards those already comfortable with essayistic, non-linear fiction in the tradition of Sebald or Kundera; it is a more challenging proposition for readers who have not yet encountered that mode.