Flights

Starred review from May 28, 2018
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize, this novel from Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night) is an indisputable masterpiece of "controlled psychosis," as one of the characters phrases it. Written in a cacophony of voices, the book's themes accumulate not from plot, but rather associations and resonances. It begins in Croatia, where a tourist, Kunicki, is lazily smoking cigarettes beside his car in an island olive grove, waiting for his wife and son to return from a short walk. Except they don't, and Kunicki must frantically search for his lost family in a sun-drenched paradise, 10 kilometers in diameter. The novel then, after some number of pages and disjointed narratives, joins the peculiar anatomist Dr. Blau's journey to the seaside village home of a recently deceased rival. This prompts the retelling of the sad, true tale of Angelo Soliman, born in Nigeria, who had lived as a dignified and respected Viennese courtier, only to be mummified and displayed by Francis I as a racial specimen "wearing only a grass band." This rumination on anatomy brings into the text the anatomist Philip Verheyen, born in 1648 in Flanders, who keeps his amputated leg, preserved in alcohol, on the headboard of his bed. The novel continues in this veinâdipping in and out of submerged stories, truths, and flights of fantasy stitched together by associations. Punctuated by maps and figures, the discursive novel is reminiscent of the work of Sebald. The threads ultimately converge in a remarkable way, making this an extraordinary accomplishment.

Narrator Julia Whelan shifts so smoothly through the stylistic turns of this fragmentary novel that one may well forget she is the lone narrator. Polish author Olga Tokarczuk's 2018 National Book Award Finalist is a challenge. Each of the more than 100 chapters reads like a stand-alone reflection on the human desire to keep others close--or, conversely, to flee others' constraints. Some storylines do recur, such as that of Chopin's sister, who attempts to smuggle the late composer's heart from France back home to Poland to be buried, or another of a man as much overcome by the reappearance of his wife and child as by their disappearance. While FLIGHTS may be a turbulent ride, if listeners stick with Whelan's narration, she'll take them where they need to go. K.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine