Classically Yours : Reading 'Flights' by Olga Tokarczuk

We're picking up 'Flights' by Olga Tokarczuk for Classically Yours: PWG's Classic Books club

Join us on Monday, December 2nd, 2024 at 8 pm, as we introduce the book and author and start our reading of the classic.

The introductory session is introductory and we will read the book in the forthcoming weeks and discuss what we've read every week.

Link for the Session:

https://meet.google.com/tnt-fnkp-uhp

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ABOUT THE SESSION:

A classic is a book that is best explained as 'a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.' In 'Why Read the Classics?', Italo Calvino says 'your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.' So, if you read, why NOT the classics should be the question and not why. This initiative is for those patient folks who are willing to be engaged in dialogues with these sometimes daunting classics. It is a load best shared, which is why this group has been created.

All are welcome, the only caveat being that you commit wholeheartedly. The group is designed for a small group, small being an operative word. Something will and does get diluted in large numbers, which we are looking to avoid. If you find one of our planned books not to be up your alley, feel free to recuse yourself and hopefully, we can meet up again later over another book that might catch your fancy.

THE BOOK:

Flights is a 2007 fragmentary novel by the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. The book was translated into English by Jennifer Croft. The original Polish title refers to runaways (runners, a sect of Old Believers, who believe that being in constant motion is a trick to avoid evil.

Set between the 17th and 21st centuries, the novel is a "philosophical rumination on modern-day travel". It is structured as a series of vignettes, some fictional, and some based on fact – among them that of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen's study of the achilles tendon, and the story of Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, the sister of the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, transporting his heart back to Warsaw.

The novel won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, marking the first time a Polish author received the award.The chair of the judging panel, Lisa Appignanesi, described Tokarczuk as a "writer of wonderful wit, imagination, and literary panache".Tokarczuk and Croft shared the £50,000 prize.

THE AUTHOR:

Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk (born 1962) is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. She was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob.

Tokarczuk is noted for the mythical tone of her writing. A clinical psychologist from the University of Warsaw, she has published a collection of poems, several novels, as well as other books with shorter prose works. For Flights and The Books of Jacob, she won the Nike Awards, Poland's top literary prize, among other accolades; she won the Nike audience award five times. In 2015, she received the German-Polish Bridge Prize for her contribution to mutual understanding between European nations.

Her works have been translated into almost 40 languages, making her one of the most translated contemporary Polish writers. The Books of Jacob, regarded as her magnum opus, was released in the UK in November 2021 after seven years of translation work, followed by release in the US in February 2022. In March that year, the novel was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

ABOUT THE HOST:

Shankar is an aspiring writer, living in Pune for the past few years. He has been a lifelong reader and was bitten by the writing bug after reading books by Tobias Wolff and William Trevor. While he loves novels, especially by the Russians, he always has a particular fondness for short stories.