First published in her native Poland in 2007, it’s taken a decade for Olga Tokarczuk’s unconventional novel to find a Western audience. With its receipt of the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, it’s landed with no small amount of fanfare. Though its fragmentary structure and frequently enigmatic subject matter will challenge some readers, those same qualities, and Tokarczuk’s often hypnotically beautiful prose, make for an immersive reading experience on the dominant theme of travel.

In a recent New York Times interview, Tokarczuk offered an explanation for the book’s unusual structure: “I realized that we don’t travel in such a linear way anymore but rather jump from one point to another and back again,” she said. “So I got this idea for a ‘constellation’ novel recounting experiences that were separate from each other but could still be connected on different psychological, physical and political levels.”

Composed of dozens of narrative fragments and a handful of longer stories, what unity the novel possesses is provided by accounts of the travels of a peripatetic unnamed narrator whose earliest childhood memories of Poland’s Oder River convince her that “a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”

"Though its fragmentary structure and frequently enigmatic subject matter will challenge some readers, those same qualities, and Tokarczuk’s often hypnotically beautiful prose, make for an immersive reading experience on the dominant theme of travel."

And so we journey along with that narrator as she discourses on subjects that include airports, train travel, guidebooks and hotel lobbies, even introducing the discipline of “travel psychology,” that “studies people in transit, persons in motion, and thus situates itself in opposition to traditional psychology, which has always investigated the human being in a fixed context, in stability and stillness.” Tokarczuk skillfully simulates the restless energy of a ceaseless journey, moving from subject to subject with no apparent connection in a way that arouses the alertness and curiosity that are part of the most rewarding travel experiences. She even adds another layer of mystery by interspersing mostly antique maps of places like Jerusalem, St. Petersburg and New York City throughout the text.

Alongside the travel narrative, Tokarczuk evinces a fascination with the subject of human anatomy, including material about the process of plastination (a process for preserving body parts) and descriptions of some of the world’s more interesting collections of specimens. For all its intense intimacy, it’s an intriguing contrast to the wide-ranging quality of the travel sections. In this realm, she blends history and fiction, for example, in the story of Philip Verheyen, the 17th-century Dutch anatomist who discovered the Achilles tendon in the process of dissecting his amputated lower leg. There’s a similarly imaginative reconstruction of the events surrounding the transport of Chopin’s heart from Paris to his native Warsaw by his sister after his death in 1849.

Some of the most beguiling parts of the novel read almost like traditional short stories, and many readers will feel most grounded there. One is the unnerving tale --- told in two parts --- of a Polish man whose wife and young son disappear during a holiday on an island in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Croatia. In it, Torkarczuk brilliantly evokes his rising panic as an exhaustive search fails to locate them, and an aftermath to the incident that’s equally disturbing.

The title narrative concerns a Muscovite woman who abandons her family, one that includes a son suffering from an incurable disease, to spend her days riding the city’s metro. “Move. Get going. Blessed is he who leaves” is the story’s final line. But in a concluding tale, the account of the final journey of an elderly professor of Greek who accompanies tourist groups on cruises of the Greek islands, Tokarczuk seems to perform something of an about-face:

“In reality, movement doesn’t exist. Like the turtle in Zeno’s paradox, we’re heading nowhere, if anything we’re simply wandering into the interior of a moment, and there is no end, nor any destination. And the same might apply to space --- since we are all identically removed from infinity, there can also be no somewhere --- nothing is truly anchored on any day, nor in any place.”

FLIGHTS is a novel that demands more engagement than much of even the most challenging contemporary literary fiction. And the result of that engagement inevitably will produce radically different reading experiences for different readers. Because it lacks just about any of fiction’s normal mechanisms, its rewards will be proportional to the amount of open-minded effort invested in reading it. Indeed, after a first reading from cover to cover, it almost invites a return visit and perhaps an encounter in a random fashion. Like the narrator’s beloved Oder River, the thought that one can’t step into the same narrative twice is an exhilarating one.