May 02, 2023

#26 — Let's Travel! 🧳🛫 Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

59 minutes

About the Episode

You don’t always need a plane ticket to travel; sometimes, all you need is a book. Fiction allows us explore worlds beyond our own, taking us out of life’s everyday tangles, and allowing us to move forward with a wider perspective. So rather than travel physically, Good Scribes Only is traveling to Europe, Africa, Central America, North America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Asia by way of literature. First stop, Poland!

“Flights” by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk is fascinating in the way that mysterious, chin-scratching things are exciting….It is sometimes a work of fiction, but it is also a treatise in her theories on anatomy, philosophy, and human nature, all centered around the experience of traveling, both through the world and over time in the body.

The narrator, an unnamed Polish writer is a modern-day hunter-gatherer: she has an unending need for exploration, picking up ideas and filling them into a book of many strange parts: there are mini-essays on airports, hotels, travel psychology, guidebooks, ruminations on language, excursions into historical figures like Chopin. Some less than a page, while the fictional tales stretch 20 plus pages, all over the world and time periods. Flights is a book unlike any we've read, and if you can make it through this episode, it’s definitely worth your time.

About Good Scribes Only

Hosted by novelists and entrepreneurs Daniel Breyer & Jeremy Streich, Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. Sometimes even traveling to a place doesn't permit you to see it for how it really is for those who live there. Fiction, on the other hand, can. And thus, season 3 is about widening our perspective. We hope you're coming along can help do the same. Be sure to check out the Episode Cheat Sheet for an overview.

We hope you enjoy this discussion about 'Flights' by Olga Tokarczuk.

Episode Notes

0-5 min — Intro

5-10 min — Movie Casting

10-15 min — On Flights’ form and structure

15-20 min — Fragmentation, exploring cultures, and the human body

20-25 min — Authenticity in travel

25-30 min — Plot discussion

30-35 min — Network state and technological confusion

35-40 min — Discussion of the author

40-45 min — Anatomy and the human body

45-50 min — The spiritual side of travel