Flights is an enigmatic book. It’s quite readable and even rather charming, and yet when you finish it you’re not quite sure what you just read. If you turned it upside and shook out its contents, you’d find about 10 longer stories, embedded within a substrate of shorter meditations, anecdotes, and philosophical reflections. What you would not find is a plot.
What holds the book together in lieu of a plot is a set of themes, subjects, and preoccupations, as well as a distinct personality, a hyperaware, mildly ironic, playful tone. Some of the shorter sections are in the first person, and so it’s easy to think you’re getting to know Olga Tokarczuk as you read the various meditations and anecdotes. I think it might be unwise to make such an assumption. What I know about Tokarczuk is that she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, also that Flights won the International Booker Prize. Her latest novel, just published in English this year (2022) is titled The Books of Jacob—it’s a 900-page affair depicting the life of an 18th century Polish Jew who claimed to be the messiah.
One of the longer stories in Flights is about a man who loses his wife and child while vacationing on a Croatian island. The two get out of the car for a bathroom break in the middle of nowhere and just disappear. He looks near and then far, eventually calls the authorities who comb every inch of the island, but they find nothing. Days pass. There is no logical explanation. Either they fell into a hole somewhere or managed to cross the island on foot and escape on the ferry. Or maybe they were abducted, or swam away and drowned. The man’s experience is akin to what it feels like to lose your keys and then search you house, checking the likely places multiple times and the unlikely places at least once. Your logical mind tells you they must be in one of these places, but nevertheless they are not.
Much further on in the book we find the sequel to this story: the man is now back home in Poland, and his wife and child are with him. We don’t learn exactly how or where they eventually showed up, but we understand that the wife has offered no explanation for their absence, refusing even to acknowledge that something extraordinary has happened. This proceeds to drive the man mad; he believes she knows exactly what happened to her and is just concealing this information from him. He tries haplessly to discover the truth—asking a child psychologist to hypnotize his three-year-old son, for example, or following his wife while wearing a disguise. This ends badly when she recognizes him as she turns an aisle in a clothing store. He has a hoodie pulled up over his head:
“What are you doing here?” she says. “Do you have any idea what you look like?”
Then her eyes soften, a moment later a kind of haze comes over them, and she blinks. “Jesus,” she says, “what is going on with you? What is wrong?”
Eventually the wife and child leave (this time in a more conventional way) and the man sets out to return to the island, his only clue the Greek word Kyrios (κύριος), which he had found scribbled in his wife’s notebook.
He looks the word up in a Greek-Polish dictionary. He believes it must hold a key to the mystery because what has happened must have a meaning, and it must be possible for him to discover that meaning by sifting through the available evidence.
The various definitions of Kyrios that he finds are vague and non-overlapping. For example: “in good measure, moderation, correct relations, attain an aim, overmuch, the appropriate moment, a suitable time, a nice moment, a convenient occasion, …” The list goes on and on; we read over the man’s shoulder, trying like him to find relevance.
The English-language Wikipedia entry for Kyrios is similarly long, complex, and multifarious. At one point is says that “Kyrios defined the relationship between Jesus and those who believed in him as Christ.” Does that help? No.
The word appears in another of the stories, in this case the final one, about an elderly scholar of Ancient Greek history and literature and his younger wife. They are touring the Greek Isles by ship. They have gone on this tour for five years running; the man is paid to deliver daily lectures on the places they visit. He is becoming senile but can still pull himself together to deliver rousing lectures. It’s a poignant and rather tender story. The wife is a scholar as well, and muses that she might take over the lecture gig after her husband passes:
Karen had come up with the idea, to talk about those gods who didn’t make it into the pages of the famous, popular books, those not mentioned by Homer, then ignored by Ovid; those who didn’t make names for themselves with drama or romance; who weren’t terrifying enough, cunning enough elusive enough, who are known only from fragments of rock, from mentions, from the little extant from burned-down libraries. But thanks to that they’ve preserved something the well-known gods have lost forever—a divine volatility and ungraspability, a fluidity of form, an uncertainty of genealogy. They emerge from the shadows, from formlessness, then succumb once more to looming darkness. Just take Kairos [i.e., κύριος], who always operates at the intersection of linear, human time and divine time—circular time.
This is all very provocative, and as we read it we think back to the poor husband riffling his wife’s purse and finding this word scribbled in her notebook. But is there a deeper mystery to uncover here? I don’t know, but the implication is that to work too hard to solve the mystery is a fool’s errand.
Several of the stories deal with scientists who specialize the preservation of human tissues, in recent centuries through plastination, which is “a technique for the preservation of biological tissue that involves replacing water and fat in tissue with a polymer (such as silicone or polyester) to produce a dry durable specimen for anatomical study.” (Stay with me here.) Tokarczuk does make the interesting point that the exploration of inner space, the identification of the various organs and the ways they work together, has been as important as the exploration of our planet’s nether regions, or of the stars and galaxies. It obviously has less appeal for most people because it involves the dissection of corpses. In Flights, this is not a problem.
One of the tissue preservation stories is told from the perspective of Philip Verheyen, who was an actual 17th century Flemish surgeon, anatomist and author. Tokarczuk highlights one of Verheyen’s claims to fame, which was the discovery and naming of the Achilles tendon. She also makes much of the fact that he lost part of one leg in early adulthood, and experiences severe “phantom pain” in this missing extremity. His anguish is both physical and metaphysical; he has preserved the amputated limb and in his desperation takes it out of its liquid preservative, lays it below the remaining part of his leg, and sticks pins in it to see if there is any correspondence with the sensations he feels. There is not.
As in the story of the Polish tourist, there is something missing which must be accounted for, but which nevertheless cannot be accounted for. There is also Greece again, in the person of Achilles. Various such threads are woven throughout Flights. The ship that the Polish tourist and his family take to the Croatian island is named Poseidon; so is the tour boat that the elderly professor and his wife are on. The word panopticon appears multiple times in the book. This word can be defined either as “a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed” or as “an optical instrument combining the telescope and microscope.”
Flights is the opposite of an Agatha Christie mystery, where the details are marshalled toward a specific revelation. The details here are like ants in an ant colony, each seeming directionless but forming a definite pattern. If you enjoy the journey—the wit, the erudition, the excursions into odd moments in scientific history, the weaving together of coincidence and paradox—then you will enjoy Flights, though there is, for me at least, a faint aftertaste of exasperation. Tokarczuk has a way of approximately juxtaposing details, characters, or events in such a way that the reader's mind tries to bridge the gap, the way an electrical pulse jumps from one neuron to another. Tokarczuk is interested in what meaning feels like, not in a particular meaning.
In closing, I would like to mention that one of the stories is about a ferryboat captain named Eryk who seems to speak entirely in quotations from Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab; the one that tipped me off was “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.” One morning Eryk veers from the monotony of his twice-daily crossing route and points his boat toward the open sea. The passengers are irritated at first, but then bemused. As the story ends, the narrator informs us that she herself was “on the deck of that ferry.” Call her Ishmael.
