Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

A potpourri of brilliance from the Polish author who won the Nobel Prize in 2018. This book also won the 2018 Man Booker International prize for translations.

The organization of the book confused me at first and I almost gave up on it but I’m glad I stuck with it.

We have alternating mini-essays, many related to travel, airports and airplanes (thus the title), interspersed with a few short stories. Most of the short stories have a travel theme as well. These mini-essays focus on topics like airports becoming mini-cities in their own right, or hotel rooms, or watching people in the lobby at a hotel registration area; even selecting travel toiletries.



Some of the mini-essays come as stories you might hear from talking to strangers in your travels. She tells us that rather than seeking out people who speak her language when she travels, she avoids them. She doesn’t have anything good to say about travel guidebooks.

As the narrator travels, she’s particularly interested in museums that have collections of preserved body organs and plasticine models of human veins and organs. So we have essays on the early development of preservation techniques and related stories (that we assume are true), such as Chopin leaving specific instructions about how to make his death mask and how to cut out and preserve his heart in a jar.

There’s a series of letters written to Emperor Frederick from the daughter of a black North African man who had risen to be a minister and right-hand man of the emperor. Still, when the minister died the emperor had his body stuffed and preserved and put on display in his museum, along with animals, with just a fig leaf for cover. The daughter is writing to plead for his body to be returned for a Christian burial. Fact or fiction? The situation sounds true, but maybe the letters are fiction?

As I said, most of the embedded short stories relate to travel, such as one that is told in three sections throughout the book. A husband, wife and young child travel for vacation to the Croatian island of Vis in the Adriatic. The woman and child disappear. Despite searches by teams of officials and helicopters, they can’t be found. It’s a tiny island the size of Nantucket. Where could they have gone? (view spoiler)[ Yet, here they are because the story is told retrospectively after they are back safe and sound. (hide spoiler)]

Another story involves an elderly professor who gives lectures about the Greek islands on cruise ships. His frail body comes alive for his lectures.

A veterinary researcher gets an email from a former lover she has not seen or heard from for 30 years. Yet she packs her bags and takes leave of her husband and kids for a trip across Russia and then back to Poland with a single astounding purpose accomplished.

There is good writing such as this passage from a short story about a woman with a teenaged son who is bedridden and completely incapacitated. She spends her life caring for him. In a rare occasion out of the house she sees teenagers in a park gathered around a girl on a horse:

“In all of them she sees her Petya; they are around the same age. Petya comes back into her body, as though she'd never given him up into the world. He's there, curled up, heavy as a stone, painful, swelling inside her, growing - it must be that she has to give birth to him again, this time out of every pore she has in her skin, sweating him out. For now he comes up in her throat, sticking in her lungs, and he won't emerge in any other way besides a sob. No, she won't be able to eat a blini - she's full. Petya’s lodged in her throat, when he could have been sitting there and reaching up with a beer can in his hand, giving it to the girl with the horse, leaning into it with his whole body, bursting out laughing. He could have been in motion…�

At various times she talks of ‘travel psychology� and even ‘travel psychoanalysis.� So we have passages like this one:

“She gives up on the idea of visiting the halls where she’d once lived. In fact, everything here repels her. Suddenly she's utterly baffled by this phenomenon of people actually choosing, of their own free will, to go back and visit the different places of their youths. What is it they think they're going to find? What is it they have to have validation of - just the fact that they had been there? Or that they’d done the right thing in leaving? Or perhaps they were urged on by some hope that recollecting more precisely these lost places would work with the lightning speed of a zipper to unite the past and future, creating a single stable surface, tooth to tooth, a metal suture.�

And a few quotes I liked:

“…life seems like a disgusting habit we lost control over a long time ago.�

“There's too much in the world. It would be wiser to reduce it, rather than expanding or enlarging it. We'd be better off stuffing it back into its little can... We have no choice now but to learn how to endlessly select.�

“…I had heard that nothing cures melancholy like looking at maps.� [As a retired geography professor, should I agree? Lol.]

It’s rare for me to think while reading a book “Wow, this person is brilliant.� But that’s the feeling I had several times while reading. It’s interesting though that the narrator tells us nothing about herself, other than at the very beginning when she writes that she thinks her wanderlust came from traveling with her parents in a camper as a child.



The author (b. 1962) has written about eight novels; almost all available in English. Her best-known work in English is Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

Top photo from ustravel.org
The author from parisreview.org

[Edited 8/13/23]