The shrouded woman is one of the bieguni, and her monologue provides the most powerful voice of the novel: “Whoever pauses will be petrified, whoever stops, pinned like an insect, his heart pierced by a wooden needle, his hands and feet drilled through and pinned into the threshold and the ceiling … This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads – this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free people to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.”įor the narrator, the obsession with wilful deracination begins in childhood, with her conformist parents and their “timid tourism” every year in the family Škoda. These wanderers appear halfway through Flights a desperate woman in an unnamed Russian city meets a seemingly crazy “shrouded” woman who shows her that there is an escape from her life of suffering. The beiguni have rejected settled life for an existence of constant movement, in the tradition of itinerant Buddhist monks.

Flights has echoes of WG Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić, but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own. Olga Tokarczuk is a household name in Poland and one of Europe’s major humanist writers, working here in the continental tradition of the “thinking” or essayistic novel. It is a novel of intuitions as much as ideas, a cacophony of voices and stories seemingly unconnected across time and space, which meander between the profound and the facetious, the mysterious and the ordinary, and whose true register remains one of glorious ambiguity. This reflects the existential preoccupations of Flights, whose central recurring tropes are physical movement, the mortal body and the meaning of home. The narrator, an alterego of the author and a good-humoured, reliable voice that carries the novel through its many digressions, meets him on one of her countless peregrinations, and he quotes Cioran at her: “It was clear to me that our mission was to graze the dust in search of a mystery stripped of anything serious.” He feels that European hotels would do well to replace the obligatory Bible with Cioran, because the Bible was no use “for the purposes of predicting the future”.

O ne of the fragment-chapters in this fascinating novel of fragments tells of a man who takes a particular book on his travels: a short one by the French-Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran.

Flights by tokarczuk