![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “It could almost be an inventory of the ways narrative can serve a writer short of, and beyond, telling a story,” he said. I meet Tokarczuk before an interview at the British Library by the critic Adam Mars-Jones, who wrote a highly complimentary review of Flights in the London Review of Books. She has long been one of Poland’s highest profile writers – a vegetarian feminist in an increasingly reactionary, patriarchal country, and a public intellectual whose every utterance can make news headlines.įlights combines (among other things) the observations of a fretful modern traveller with the story of a wandering Slavic sect, a biography of a 17th-century Flemish anatomist and an account of the posthumous journey of Chopin’s heart from Paris, where the Polish composer died, to his desired resting place in Warsaw. The trade weekly, speaking specifically to a UK readership, can be forgiven for making such a bald assertion – even though she has had two previous novels translated into English – since it is only now that Flights has been shortlisted for the Man Booker international prize that Tokarczuk has begun to command the sort of attention in the English-speaking world that her home fans would consider her due. W hen Olga Tokarczuk’s sixth novel, Flights, was about to be published in the UK last year the Bookseller trilled that “she is probably one of the greatest living writers you have never heard of”. ![]()
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