“Flights”, a novel translated by Jennifer Croft, is a deserving winner of the Man Booker International prize
EVERYTHING in “Flights” is lucidly, if fragmentarily, recounted by its narrator. “My spatial reasoning is particularly advanced, almost eidetic, though my laterality is lousy. Personality unstable, or not entirely reliable. Age all in your mind. Gender ungrammatical. I actually buy my books in paperback, so that I can leave them behind without remorse on the platform, for someone else to find. I don’t collect anything.” Moments of such surprising self-revelation recur, like staccato mantras, throughout the book. It is this originality of voice that made Olga Tokarczuk, the author, and Jennifer Croft, who translated the work, the latest recipients of the International Man Booker prize. The judges noted that the novel “guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind”.
The prize is awarded each year to a work of foreign fiction translated into English. “Flights” appeared in Poland in 2007, winning the Nike prize there, and was quickly translated into French and German, among other languages (English-language imprints were strangely slow to respond to Ms Tokarczuk’s achievement). Ms Tokarczuk and Ms Croft will share the £50,000 ($66,700) prize money, and rightly so: the translation is willowy and reverberant. Ms Croft stated that she had been “fascinated” to be “inside Olga’s mind”.
“Flights”, Ms Tokarzcuk’s seventh novel, is emphatically set in the real world: a departure from the myth-making tone of her previous work. She had long been drawn to fairy tales and Jungian archetypes, tools that frequently helped her to reimagine Polish history. “Flights”, really an almanac of stories, is thrillingly transnational. There is much throughout about the human body, and its encounters with life and mortality: a 17th-century Flemish surgeon writes to and nurtures his amputated leg; an 18th-century woman sends letters to the Holy Roman Emperor requesting that her father’s body be returned for burial. But it is mostly occupied with journeys both invented—a man mysteriously “loses” his wife and son on a Croatian island—and historical, such as that made by Chopin’s sister to smuggle the composer’s heart from France into Poland. In one section, the narrator opines on how 21st-century airports have become meccas, giant cities, for a new citizenry—travellers in transit.
Though the narrator refuses to be identified, one guesses she is based on Ms Tokarczuk. “I was a waitress, a maid in an upscale hotel, and a nanny,” she writes early on; and indeed the author spent a stint years ago cleaning hotel rooms in London (which she has written about elsewhere). Ms Tokarczuk has spoken about the fact she didn’t have a passport until she was 30, a fact belying the global crisscrossings the many characters in “Flights” make. Discovering the world anew clearly fed wonderfully into this most genre-bending of works. “Enormous damage has been done by travel literature,” the narrator states wryly. “A veritable scourge, an epidemic. Guidebooks have conclusively ruined the greater part of the planet…”
In Poland, Ms Tokarczuk (who calls herself “a Central European writer”) has published poetry, short stories and the occasional bit of journalism. She has also been vocal in her criticism of a tendency in Poland’s public conversation to paint the nation’s past as all-virtuous: free of colonialism, ethnically pure—which is far from true. During a television interview for her most recent novel, “The Books of Jacob”, in 2015, she enraged nationalists and found herself a target of death threats. Her publisher briefly gave her extra protection, but she quickly noted how baseless the attacks had been.
Such fearlessness is reflected in her willingness to play with conventional fictional forms. Ms Tokarzcuk is unquestionably the highest-profile novelist of her generation in Poland. Though no straight teller of tales, she knows how to weave poetic magic—so expertly rendered by Ms Croft—in radiantly readable prose. Perhaps more Anglophone readers will now get the opportunity to be enchanted by her stories.