Towards What?

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft. Riverhead Books, 2018, $26.00 cloth.

OF THE deep and manifold fascinations to be found in Chris Marker’s 1983 docu-essay , one of the chief formal characteristics to which my mind returns and returns is the epistolary mode in which the film is framed. “He wrote me,” an unseen female narrator repeats to start each vignette, as the film swims across continents and across time in the footsteps of the nameless letter-writer. Reading Olga Tokarczuk’s (which garnered her and her translator, Jennifer Croft, the 2018 Man Booker International Prize), I couldn’t help but feel there was a fundamental kinship between it and the letters that form the body of Marker’s film. It is as though the female narrator whose thoughts comprise armature and the disembodied wanderer through whose eyes were a single soul poured into two vessels, lone voyagers twinned in their pilgrim spirit—as if the woman to whom letters are addressed had not been content simply to sit by the letterbox and wait, but had set off on a far-flung, years-long journey for herself and had now come back (if indeed so quaint a concept as “home” should hold any relevance for her) with tales of her own to tell.