Tag Archives: travel

Olga Tokarcquk’s Flights won the Booker and the National Book Award and so I figured it had to be good. And it is? No, it is. But it’s strange. In form, mostly. It’s written as a series of fragmented chapters – some no more than a paragraph, others stretching for 20 or 30 pages – all circling one another thematically, but not necessarily, or usually, by plot or character. It’s an exercise in immersion and floating, I’d say, to let go of the usual anchors of the novel and to suspend yourself in something like a mass collection of postcards that you’ve been tasked with assembling into a cogent archive. Continue reading →