Liz Polding reviews ‘Flights‘ by Olga Tocarczuk, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy.
The book carries you along, almost literally since it is centred around the idea of constant movement. Movement as life, never still, never settling, always moving, discovering, examining. The book begins with the author’s constant travel, attending conferences, almost living at airports, discussing airports almost as cities in their own right, with every possible facility. And as we go forward with the author, she also takes us into the past to consider how we know what we know about ourselves, our mortality, and most of all, our physical selves.
The author considers the Body Works travelling exhibition. The exhibition shows us the complex networks and pathways of our physical selves. Our veins, our tendons, our muscles, all beautifully and cleverly preserved; the mysteries on which the early anatomists could only speculate, or risk excommunication, or worse, to find out. Those early anatomists emerge from the past, charting the history of how we obtained the knowledge that we have and leading up to the Body Works exhibition, where nothing is a mystery, everything is made clear. Some of the examples are quite jaw-droppingly bizarre; Chopin’s heart, removed from his corpse and transported to its final destination in Warsaw and the anatomist who actually dissected his own amputated limb. Interwoven with these stories are others, disappearing and then resurfacing later in the book; most notably, perhaps, the man whose wife and child disappear and then suddenly reappear, to his bafflement and ours.
All in all, this is not a linear story and it can be quite unsettling in places. The ‘anatomy’ parts are written in such a way that you are fascinated, rather than wanting to turn away. It says a lot about us as both physical and spiritual beings; restless, curious and ceaselessly moving forward.
The book won a number of prizes, including the Nobel Prize for literature.
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