Movers & Shakers

By Kohinoor Dasgupta

The English translation of Bieguni by Olga Tokarczuk was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (London) in 2017 and the following year by Riverhead Books (New York). Titled Flights in Jennifer Croft’s translation, the book won the International Booker Prize in 2018.

Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków, published Bieguni in 2007. A decade elapsed before the Polish book reached people who read fiction in the English language. As per the narrator of Bieguni, travelers who have only English are in everyone’s ear at airports and other public places. I have a couple of languages to fall back on for privacy and read Olga Tokarczuk in English translations. For a whole decade Bieguni eluded the ubiquitous language while its author kept moving and logging for readers milestones such as Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (2009) and Księgi Jakubowe (2014).* Olga Tokarczuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019.

Flights cranes its neck and eavesdrops; it meditates and marvels and expresses concern about a darkening world. Using many modes of movement, it seeks out "pilgrims" and traces "pilgrimages", including those which were stillborn or cut short. 'HERE I AM’, it begins and (almost) ends with 'I’M HERE'. The narrator of Flights is an invention, Tokarczuk told author and cultural journalist Xavi Ayén in an interview uploaded to YouTube in November 2024 by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). Tokarczuk said: "She is based on my biography, but not totally." Still, most readers will imagine that they see the author herself here and there. I do in the following passage, for instance, and cherish the image of Tokarczuk writing in a museum stairwell:

"I've learned to write on trains and in hotels and waiting rooms. On the tray tables on planes. I take notes at lunch, under the table or in the bathroom. I write in museum stairwells, in cafés, in the car on the shoulder of the motorway. I jot things down on scraps of paper, in notebooks, on postcards, on my other hand, on napkins, in the margins of books. Usually they’re short sentences, little images, but sometimes I copy out quotes from the papers. Sometimes a figure carves itself out of the crowd, and then I deviate from my itinerary to follow it for a moment, start on its story."

The narrator’s directness gives the book the intimacy of a wide-ranging conversation with a person who expects you to engage and interact.

Wikipedia characterizes Flights as a "fragmentary novel". In the interview with Xavi Ayén referenced above, speaking in English, Tokarczuk said this about inventing a form:

"…books about traveling, it's a kind of genre, but I felt, in this contemporary way of traveling, it is not enough to use the old form. So, I started to think about my own expression of this experience of traveling, of moving, of observing people who are traveling … We are living in a world that is, specially because of flying, it's… like popping … up in one place and then the other … it's like opening windows on the computer … You can change from …. gossip about celebrities and into politics and then to fashion … So, our contemporary experience is different than … the travelers of the past. They (had) … a linear experience, going from one point to the other, with these stops and overnights and so on. Now we are jumping. And I tried to find a form, how to describe, how to be convincing to the reader that it is an entire story of traveling but written in small fragments, in those just popping moments, somewhere in the place. …One metaphor came into my mind, that it was like this, perhaps … somewhere … the balcony or terrace, you can see the beautiful night sky and you can see the point(s) of stars and planets … but then your mind is able to see figures … even more because these figures have a context in mythology, so you can see the stories, the conflicts, the lovers, for instance, escaping. … I told myself that it could be a kind of novel written in small fragments, but to trust the readers' minds … can collect all the small fragments, small stories, into one constellation. Then I started to use this term 'constellation novel'…”

In Psychology, "constellation" refers to a cluster of related thoughts or feelings around a central idea.

But the book resists labels, even the one given by the author. It won't be pinned down. And why is that? For one thing, there are several constellations in it, diverse and contradictory experiences and beliefs. Secondly, the book is never done with us. We can't escape with shallow interest and lazy emojis. The fragments and stories are starter-dough. They go to work with us. The book is too stir-crazy and sociable to be a novel, even a picaresque one.

Nor is it non-fiction, like John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley or Ernesto Guevara’s travel diaries or Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult and its Mediterranean Relations (1901) by Oxford archaeologist Arthur J. Evans. For example, the Chinese businessman who relates to the narrator his experience of standing before the sacred fig tree in Bodh Gaya (in 'THE BODHI TREE') may be a fictitious pilgrim, but the tree exists, as do clear directions to the Middle Way. Flights constantly relies on multi-disciplinary facts to create fiction. Whereas in Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult Prof. Evans (who doesn't feature in Flights) detailed his seminal discoveries in Crete, presenting evidence for his conclusions, in a story called ‘KAIROS’ Tokarczuk invents a pair of modern-day scholars of Classical Antiquity, one of whom is the expert lecturer on a pricey, special-interest cruise of Greek islands, to turn our attention to time-defying human endeavor as well as to the flight of time. This story is constellated with several others in Flights, such as the 'KUNICKI' set and the one about Eryk (‘ASH WEDNESDAY FEAST’).

The narrator being a fictional character is a plus for the novel argument. She even begins novelistically, in early childhood ('HERE I AM'), and goes on to describe her parents' touristic activities. Later she mentions a friend who entertains her American tour groups with stories by Jorge Luis Borges and from One Thousand and One Nights, but not strictly as given – because why bother with accuracy when stories jostle each other in ‘UNUS MUNDUS’? The narrator is, however, a true nomad whose emotions don’t root her anywhere. Her purpose in traveling isn’t finding the next oasis or territorial conquest or pillage or escaping bloody conflicts or poverty or meeting loved ones or medical treatment or business or leisure activities. She isn’t an active character in any of her longer stories. She doesn’t share her emotional history. Our connection with her is forged by fellow-feeling (her coin purse was stolen in Stockholm, her “iron rations” on a layover include a page-turner) and by her ability to reveal constellations.

Flights includes eleven maps and drawings taken from the Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps, published by Peppin Press, Amsterdam, in 2005. (These include 'Details of St. Petersburg’, 1850, and ‘The wanderings of Odysseus represented on a map for the Odyssey', 1911). The borrowings from the map book published in Amsterdam is one of the myriad imprints of Holland on Flights. The Museum Boerhaave of Leiden and Amsterdam’s Vrolik Museum were stops in the narrator’s itinerarium of nine specialty museums. The Dutch connection is webbed into 'THE ACHILLES TENDON' set of fragments. Philip Verheyen (1648-1710), who discovered and named that tendon and is renowned for his Corporis Humani Anatomia (1693) was Flemish by birth. According to Wikipedia, Verheyen attended the University of Leiden in Holland for two years. He taught medical students at Leuven (in modern-day Belgium). Tokarczuk situates Philip Verheyen in Rijnsburg, Holland, in the winter of 1689, and has a student of his, "William van Horssen", bringing tickets to a lecture-demonstration to be given in Amsterdam by Prof. Frederik Ruysch. Ruysch (1638-1731) was a pioneering embalmer and anatomist. He had a vast collection of anatomical specimens.

(Another fragment, titled '30,000 GUILDERS', takes Ruysch's careful assistant, his daughter, fifty-year-old Charlotta, to the docks of Amsterdam on the day Ruysch’s collection of specimens is scheduled to leave for St. Petersburg on Tsar Peter I’s "three-master". Charlotta has a sudden urge to cut her hair, dress like a man and sail away on an East India Company ship. Does she or doesn't she escape? Our physical bodies are not all we have. In ‘KUNSTKAMMER’, the narrator visits the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg and recognizes Charlotta Ruysch’s sensitive artwork on the shale lid of a jar containing one of her father’s anatomical specimens, a small fetus.)

Philip Verheyen had to have his left leg amputated below the knee when he was twenty-eight years old. According to the Flights story, the surgery was performed flawlessly by Dirk Kerkrinck, who had been one of Prof. Ruysch's students. Dr. Kerkrinck was also William van Horssen's uncle. The surgeon of the story could be the real Theodore Kerckring or Kerkrinck who lived from 1638 to 1693 and studied medicine at the University of Leiden.

'THE ACHILLES TENDON' set is important to the body-pain-God-reliquary-remains themes in Flights. Another genius of the Dutch Golden Age is given an off-stage part in this set. Verheyen’s microscope has "lenses ground by Benedictus Spinoza". The celebrated philosopher Spinoza was born in 1632 in Amsterdam to Portuguese immigrants. He was excommunicated from the Jewish community in 1656 for his views. Spinoza lived in Rijnsburg for some time and earned a living by making scientific instruments and polishing lenses. He died in The Hague in 1677.

The following lines are from the imaginary fragment titled 'THE HISTORY OF PHILIP VERHEYEN, WRITTEN BY HIS STUDENT AND CONFIDANT WILLEM VAN HORSSEN'. Van Horssen informs us that not only did Verheyen admire Spinoza's skill as a lens crafter, but he also read Spinoza's work which was considered radical at the time. Verheyen himself was a religious man, a Christian. He met Spinoza when he was too young to understand philosophy, but he remembered Spinoza’s presence:

"This was as much as Verheyen remembered from these meetings, and Spinoza remained for all time his master, whom he would read and battle fervently. Perhaps it was these meetings with this ordered mind, with his power of thought and need to understand, that prompted young Philip to study theology in Leiden.”

The narrator finds herself drawn to "all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken". Although she is more interested in medical history museums than in museums of art, Rembrandt van Rijn, born in Leiden in 1606 and another genius of the Dutch Golden Age, isn’t omitted in Flights. Even “fakes” of his work cast a spell on folks transiting through an airport.

Map of Leiden, 1574, from Rembrandt, Substance and Shadow by Pascal Bonafoux

Annushka’s story shares the book’s title, as given by translator Jennifer Croft. Its opening fragment jolts with its darkness. Is this the narrator speaking? This voice is raw and intended to be confusing because Annushka has sleepless nights too and may also think that the world is dark, motionless and cold and daylight is a flight of fancy. Night obliterates details of the external world. The little girl of 'HERE I AM', too could see nothing outside the window when night fell but, unlike the narrator or Annushka, she felt no anxiety. Instead, she became aware of herself.

Tourists foil Annushka’s weekly pilgrimage. She has to make her way to an old church down the road. There "the vast face of the gloomy icon" (of Christ) seems to say specifically to her, "Look, here I am". He infects her with seeing. Eventually the bieguni (runners/Runaways) on and in the vicinity of Moscow’s metro enter her awareness. The "shrouded woman" in front of Kievsky Station is one of them. Annushka used to give her a wide berth. She used to find the woman scary and bizarre, especially because of the incomprehensible, angry-sounding words gushing incessantly out of her mouth. In the fragment titled 'WHAT THE SHROUDED RUNAWAY WAS SAYING', those words are interpreted and they turn out to be perfectly comprehensible in the secret tongue of the Runaways, members of a sect (of Christianity) which came into existence in eighteenth-century Russia. The shrouded woman, a twenty-first-century cultist, performs her daily devotions by pacing in her corner and warning passers-by that Satan is always hunting and people can save themselves by being on the move.

The following is an excerpt from the shrouded woman’s rant:

“… tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for nomads …

“What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time’s passage. They want the days to repeat themselves, unchanging; they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions….

“What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of bar codes, labeling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you….”

*Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2018); translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and The Books of Jacob (2021), translated by Jennifer Croft.