Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that--in spite of all the risks involved--a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.

The narrator of Flights, a novel by recent Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, is a traveler by nature.  She spends her entire life flying from one place to another, supporting her travels by odd jobs, but it's the only life she can imagine: staying in one place is a kind of death; it's movement that means life.  The style of Flights, too, reinforces this idea, flitting--flying--from one narrative to another, or from vignette to vignette.  Scenes only hold her interest for so long: accounts of certain airplane flights, or certain passengers, a lecture series on "travel psychology" that takes place in airports, meditations on what airports look like from above and what it is like to have no home but hotels.

But the best parts of Flights are when the narrative, despite itself, settles down and tells a longer narrative.  There are probably seven or eight "major" stories in Flights, each one broken into pieces and scattered to appease the narrator's need for movement.  In one, titled "Kunicki," a Polish man traveling on a Croatian island searches for his wife and son after their sudden and unexplained disappearance.  Later, they return with an improbable story of falling ill and hiding in an abandoned home for days, but their disappearance has changed his life irrevocably; not only can he no longer trust her, the very sight of his home seems to have changed somehow.  Did she leave on a whim, abandoning him, only to return?  A counterpart is the unrelated story of Annushka, who leaves her distant husband and critically ill son to live underground in Moscow's metro system, choosing homelessness--movement--over safety and stillness.

The narratives in Flights are haunted by death and by the body.  Death, of course, is the ultimate kind of stillness, and the body the site at which it enters, or perhaps the natural state of motion leaves.  One strange motif in these narratives is plastination, the process by which human tissue is preserved after death, stasis imposed against the forces of decay, which are also a kind of motion.  In one longer narrative, a doctor desperately searches for a secret formula which will provide a superior form of plastination; in another, a man discovers the Achilles' tendon by operating on his own amputated leg, which has been preserved.  A collection of preserved organs nearly causes a mutiny on board a ship when the sailors discover they've been preserved in (gross) brandy.

Flights seems like that truly rare thing: a book that understands something critical about contemporary life.  The "Jet Age" may seem like an antiquated term, but the fact of widespread global travel is only a few decades old, and we are only now perhaps beginning to understand what that means for the human mind and spirit.  An extended meditation on Wikipedia--an attempt to encapsulate the whole of human knowledge, which must reckon with its need to reflect change and its capability to impose permanence--seems wise and true rather than forced, which is not something I think most writers could do.  Writing a novel is an inherently backward-looking exercise; Flights looks forward to what we might become.  In the future, will we all be like Tokarczuk's narrator, who dismisses the obligations of mortgages, of time zones?  And if so, is that tragedy or victory?