The narrator associates her curiosity about anatomical preservation with her writing practices, which seek to preserve people, both living and dead. The narrator is most interested in the relatively new practice of plastination, a method by which the preserved organ or body retains a nearly lifelike appearance. The narrator is attracted to preserved organs and anatomical displays that feature differences from the average human form her curiosity extends to the anatomists and scholars who developed the preservation techniques used in these exhibits. The “pilgrims” associated with her destinations correspond to the anatomical and human curiosity exhibits she visits around the globe. In her travel writing fragments, the narrator repeats the phrase “ach of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim” (19 first occurrence). Both writing and constant travel allow the narrator to distance herself from the effects of modern society and live outside of its influences. The narrator discusses her own writing, the morality of telling stories, and those stories’ possible impact on a global capitalistic society with which she strongly disagrees in her view, movement and curiosity are innate human impulses that modern society has suppressed. This allows the narrator to explore the dissolution of boundaries and of linear time-ideas that she has encountered at lectures given by travel psychologists at various airports around the world. Without distinct chapters, the text of the novel is broken only by the shift from fragment to fragment or from fragment to fiction. These vignettes center around characters based on either strangers that the narrator has met during her travels or on historical figures. With her signature grace and insight, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind.In Flights, the unnamed narrator combines a series of travel writing fragments with fictional vignettes. In the present we have the trials of a wife accompanying her much older husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, and the harrowing story of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish on a holiday on a Croatian island. In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin's heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw. From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Flights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk's most ambitious to date.

Flights olga