![]() ![]() ![]() It took them a long time to notice I was gone, which meant I was able to make it quite some distance. The first trip I ever took was across the fields, on foot. As a young child the narrator finds her way to the Oder river: he who rules the world has no power over movement and knows that our body in motion is holy, and only then can you escape him, once you’ve taken off.” The English edition has chosen the more generic title Flights (also taken from one of the many different pieces that comprise the novel).īoth speak to the theme of the novel: travel, and the necessity for some of always being in motion rather than at rest. The Polish original was entitled Bieguni, after a peculiar (possibly apocryphal) sect who believed that the only way to escape the power of the Antichrist was to avoid stability, “anything that has a stable place in this world - every country, church, every human government, everything that has a preserved form in this hell - is at his command. His eyes attentively probe their constellations, positionings, the directions they point in, the shapes they make.įlights, published by perhaps the UK’s finest publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and seamlessly translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft (who translates from Argentinian Spanish as well as Polish), is the first Olga Tokarczuk novel I have read, but it certainly won’t be the last. ![]() ![]() Throughout this beautiful chaos, threads of meaning spread in all directions, networks of strange logic. ![]()
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