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Rating: 2.5

This is a book that demands a lot of mental work and, at slightly more than 400 pages, a considerable time investment. While I don’t exactly regret reading it—which is something, I suppose, I was far less impressed with it than most. I’d like to have more to show for my time than I do. This is a fragmented, chaotic, and even careless book roughly organized around the topics of travel and anatomy. As advertised, it is not a traditional or conventional novel—perhaps not a novel at all. It’s a collection of loosely connected stories (many of them inconclusive), anecdotes, facts, a lot of pseudo facts (information that masquerades as having a foundation in reality), ruminations, and attempts at playfulness, cleverness—some of them self-conscious or self-referential. It seems that Tokarczuk did a fair bit of consulting of Wikipedia and who knows what other sources to create her book. (She marvels at the online, collaborative encyclopaedia more than once in Flights.)

Whatever the case, a lot of the “information� Tokarczuk presents in her book is just flat-out wrong. Dark matter, for example, does not account for three-quarters of the universe. According to NASA, it makes up about 27%, while 68% of the universe is dark energy. Any basic anatomy or neurology text will tell you we do not, as Tokarczuk alleges, owe our short-term memory to the hippocampus. The hippocampus is actually involved in long-term memory storage. Atatürk, whose reforms came in the 1920s, was not responsible for the cruel removal of dogs from Constantinople/Istanbul to an island in the Bosporus, where they would die of thirst and starvation. This came in the early 1900s, according to humanities and law professor Colin Dayan in her 2016 book With Dogs at the Edge of Life (Columbia University Press) and other sources.

Is Tokarczuk’s carelessness with facts in this book intentional—some sort of deliberate “post-modern� disregard for accuracy� or is it a result of translator or editorial carelessness? I don’t know, but I don’t see how it serves her “meditation� on travel and anatomy. After I encountered several such errors, I mistrusted the author. Why was I struggling to parse her sometimes tedious lectures on “travel psychology� and discussions of imaginary psychological syndromes that had no foundation in reality? The book increasingly became a sort of futile game I didn’t care to participate in. While I enjoyed a couple of the longer stories Tokarczuk included—for example, the story of a New Zealand biologist (whose work involves the extermination of invasive species) returning to her native Poland to facilitate the assisted suicide of a former lover, and another about a despairing Russian wife and mother, who rides the subway for days on end to escape her hopeless home life—for me, this book just didn’t come together. The idea that things in motion aren’t ultimately as subject to entropy as things at rest just seemed silly. A book that initially struck me as stimulating and clever soon lost its lustre. Flights turned out to be less than the sum of its parts and certainly overhyped.