Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
In Black Boy, Richard Wright talks about how he could not write well when he was young. He tried, but nothing came of it. So he resorted to writing perfect sentences. Sentences that would transport him to a different world.
No small amount of credit goes to Jennifer Croft for what is a remarkable English translation of Tokarczuk’s Polish text. But one can only marvel at the perfection with which Tokarczuk executes each sentence, and strings them together to write passages that provoke flights of thought.
My favorite story is that of a mother who leaves home one day and doesn’t return for a long time. She remains homeless in a train station. But it isn’t a story about someone escaping from the normalcy of their life. It is a story about what happened, with no why or how behind it. It’s a story that provokes wonder instead of analysis. And that is Tokarczuk’s magic. To distance her work from frameworks of analysis and let things be.
Perhaps Tokarczuk lets us know what to expect in the beginning. She talks about her days as a student of psychology and her fascination with what is odd instead of what is ordinary. One thing is for sure, there is nothing ordinary about Flights.