Through this unorthodox structure, Flights gives a form to motion. And so, rather than a linear, or even circular, time, the novel’s fragmentary structure models a vision of time as a vast archipelago, or a multi-layered pattern we have yet to uncover. “Constellation, not sequencing, carries truth,” announces one character, a travel psychologist.
Tracking the obsessions and desires of a multitude of beings, the novel hopscotches through time. Obsessions and desires guide the travel impulse, and their pull moves the body through the world. As a child, the sometimes-narrator “realize that-in spite of all the risks involved-a thing in motion will always be nobler than a thing in permanence.” This belief guides the entire novel: loyalty to motion over the static, to travel-through time, the world, the body. Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, is a constellation novel of over one hundred story fragments, some narrated by a nameless woman who wanders the globe, others appearing out of a contextless ether.
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