Flights
Olga Tokarczuk · 2018
A constellation novel about travel, anatomy, and the scattered self. Tokarczuk invented a form here that feels like the only honest way to render modern consciousness. Her 2019 Nobel and this book's International Booker win established that the novel didn't have to be one thing.
The case against
Fragments are a bet that the reader will supply the connections, and Tokarczuk only sometimes wins it. For every Chopin's heart or Kunicki story there are pages of airport-lounge aphorisms about motion and maps that read like a gifted writer's notebook, unassembled. The form forgives nothing being finished, and by the end that forgiveness has been heavily drawn on.
Best of Last 10 Years · the Pro canon
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