well, this one was good.

the book reminded me of those moments when you momentarily become acutely aware of yourself and your surroundings, when you snap the world into focus. indeed, time is quite the topic to wonder about, especially when you live it, and it lives through you, and it outlives you and lives you out.
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Flights is about all that. Tokarczuk argues for a conceptualization of time as moments of 'living the space' one finds themselves in. and when you travel - which is the creative engine of the novel - time feels even the more spaced out in portions of land, surroundings, people, memories. when you find yourself in a different country, is it the country in its complexity and entirety that you experience? or is it rather the excitement of the moment, the thrill of the new, of the small circle of tarmac under your feet and what is revealed above it and before your eyes? it's quite reduced, our capacity of perception. when you behold a novel space in a novel land, you behold the space through yourself, and time forever remains defined by that space that you lived and abandoned. why is it that we remember places and people, and more often without the preciseness of when it occurred? at times, Tokarczuk's presence feels like Time itself, watching over the reader and spinning a story of airports, anatomy, ecology, fairly diverse themes, but each and every one fueled by connections.
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at times the novel feels uneven, but i think time is like that too, irregular and surprising. one particular subject is the phantom limb, a biological condition where one continues to feel the presence of a limb after amputation. a character lives a life of pain and itch in a leg he lost as a child. and it makes you wonder, what is presence? what is absence? this is a good book overall, it makes you feel and think. i wish it had taken more risks, that it had been truly experimental, but Tokarczuk's style makes it worth anyone's time all the same.


[full review here]