Unrast - ComeLibros Club

Hardcover, 460 pages

German language

Published 2019 by Büchergilde Gutenberg.

ISBN:: 978-3-7632-7176-4

(1 review)

Noch nie wurde so viel gereist wie heute. Und doch ist die Sehnsucht, sich in der Welt zu verlieren, nicht gestillt, hat sich das Reisen trotz Massentourismus eine eigene Poesie bewahrt. Aber was heißt es, in dieser rasenden und zunehmend vernetzten Welt ein Wanderer, ein Körper in Bewegung zu sein? Was heißt es, nicht nur durch den Raum, sondern auch durch die Zeit zu reisen? Unrast ist voller Geschichten, Mythen, Lebensbekenntnisse, Notizen und Gedanken über das Reisen, über Entwurzelung und Migration. Unrast ist ein Potpourri unterschiedlichster Geschichten, die aber einem geheimen Fahrplan folgen und eine gemeinsame Destination haben.

7 editions

Fionnáin reviewed Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

A story from the perspective of travel

5 stars

Flights is a story where the protagonist seems to be travel itself. Billed as a novel, the book is split into many short chapters, some only a paragraph long, some many pages. Each chapter visits a specific moment of travel, or some part of the books other linked themes: preservation of bodies, colonialism and hierarchy, or disconnection and disregard of women.

I adore Olga Tokarczuk's writing. Her understanding of the craft and her breadth of imagination are a wonder, and her worldview is so respectfully and carefully entangled in her books that she is one of very few authors I read who can open new worlds in her works. So many moments of this book will stay with me. She builds worlds in moments and then discards them just as rapidly, as if all the stories were constructed out the window of an airplane leaving the runway. Her observations on …

Flights is a story where the protagonist seems to be travel itself. Billed as a novel, the book is split into many short chapters, some only a paragraph long, some many pages. Each chapter visits a specific moment of travel, or some part of the books other linked themes: preservation of bodies, colonialism and hierarchy, or disconnection and disregard of women.

I adore Olga Tokarczuk's writing. Her understanding of the craft and her breadth of imagination are a wonder, and her worldview is so respectfully and carefully entangled in her books that she is one of very few authors I read who can open new worlds in her works. So many moments of this book will stay with me. She builds worlds in moments and then discards them just as rapidly, as if all the stories were constructed out the window of an airplane leaving the runway. Her observations on travel feel like a post-air-travel epithet, recording for future generations what it was once like to fly in airplanes around a world that came to feel so small.

The book is a marvel for all of its small moments and its clever way of putting travel at the centre of a story. At times I felt it a little jarring to leap from one story to the next, although that is clearly the intention of a book written in such an experimental format. On the whole, this is another masterpiece by one of the best living authors in the world.