![]() The beiguni have rejected settled life for an existence of constant movement, in the tradition of itinerant Buddhist monks. The bieguni, or wanderers, are an obscure and possibly fictional Slavic sect who have rejected settled life for an existence of constant movement, in the tradition of the travelling yogi, wandering dervishes or itinerant Buddhist monks who survive on the kindness of strangers. This word is the key to the book, much more so than the freely rendered “Flights”, a bland but understandable choice in the mostly smooth translation of Jennifer Croft. I first read this novel in Bulgarian translation, where the original Polish title has been kept: Bieguni. Flights has echoes of WG Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić, but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own. Olga Tokarczuk is a household name in Poland and one of Europe’s major humanist writers, working here in the continental tradition of the “thinking” or essayistic novel. ![]() It is a novel of intuitions as much as ideas, a cacophony of voices and stories seemingly unconnected across time and space, which meander between the profound and the facetious, the mysterious and the ordinary, and whose true register remains one of glorious ambiguity. This reflects the existential preoccupations of Flights, whose central recurring tropes are physical movement, the mortal body and the meaning of home. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |