The novel Flights is dedicated to the theme of travel. It consists of separate short stories, essays and travel notes, united by a common plot, which is travelling. A total amount of fragments is 116, but they differ one from the other in length – some are of just few sentences, some are of more than 30 pages. The common thing for all the fragments is the narrator, who is the author herself.
The novel cannot be retold in a traditional way, as the plot is constantly slipping away. It consists of disparate, unequal passages: letters, diary entries, overheard conversations, revelations of fellow travelers. Even the most voluminous and detailed stories begin and end suddenly, as if captured out of reality. The novel mostly contains notes on how people behave at the airport, or what they are looking at when wake up at the new hotel, or that women after 50 become invisible to everyone.
The title of the novel refers to the old sect, the members of which believed that the salvation of the soul is possible only in isolation from public and state institutions, in the state of eternal wandering. The characters of Flights also are trying to escape from of a settled life. But the impulse that forces them to leave their inhabited houses and move in an unknown direction, is different.
Here is Annushka, the mother of the invalid, who leaves for medicine and suddenly decides not to return. Annushka spends few days in Moscow metro going by the train around and around. She has less money with each day, but does not return home. The reader never learns whether she came back or not.
Here is Vershynin and his wife, who leaves suddenly the car with their three-year-old son, and disappears for three days. When she comes back, she is a completely different person. Neither Vershynin nor the reader learns, where she has been or what has happened to her.
Here the narrator herself briefly freezes at the next point of her endless journey - the airport, hotel room, half-empty bar – with the purpose to record another overheard story about the same restless soul.
Tokarczuk introduces also chapters that tell about discoveries in the field of anatomy - the first autopsy, experiments on the preservation of human organs, body parts, embryos with developmental disabilities. Her method is the pathologist’s method – cold and ruthless preparation. A man takes himself apart, explores the smallest particles of his own body in search of his essence. But he does not gain insight, because he is not equal to the sum of all its parts taken together.
