It is about different kinds of maps: maps of places – which themselves figure in the book – maps of the body, in particular the work of the anatomists who have both described and destroyed the body, captured and mapped it and shared it like those multi-language guide books do maps of the mind, of consciousness, of the art of travelling and the question of motion. Flights is a book about travel, it is about maps. So let me attempt a little act of destructive description here. The truth is terrible: describing is destroying.” But when I would go back to those descriptions later, when I’d try to take a deep breath and allow their intense presence to choke me up all over again, when I’d try to listen in on their murmurings, I was always in for a shock. Even I, in my youthful naivete, once took a shot at the description of places. Guidebooks have conclusively ruined the greater part of the planet published in editions numbering in the millions, in many languages, they have debilitated places, pinning them down and naming them, blurring their contours. Enormous damage has been done by travel literature – a veritable scourge, an epidemic.

“Describing something is like using it – it destroys the colours wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what’s been described begins to fade, to disappear. In fact not just impossible but actually counter to the philosophy of the book itself which posits description, in one posting anyway, as an act of destruction in itself: It is hard to describe and it is even harder to review because reviewing requires some description and the nebulousness of this book makes description impossible. Flights is one of those books which is hard to describe.

Flights olga tokarczuk review