She’s known in Poland for her mythical prose style, and Jennifer Croft, to her immense credit, has beautifully translated this quality into English: Flights is filled with liquid, mellifluous prose. Tokarczuk calls Flights her ‘constellation novel’ of orphic yet meticulous narratives that traverse time and space. It’s a brilliant, experimental tour de force, a book of fragments. Fitzcarraldo’s signed up for two of her works, Flights and The Books of Jacob – and when you read Flights, you understand why. I felt stupid for not having heard of her before. Take Olga Tokarczuk: a Polish household name, author of eight novels and two short story collections, translated in a dozen languages, recipient of numerous awards. Crucially, in our Trump/Brexit state of the world, they seem to have made it their mission to translate artists who are lauded in their home countries but aren’t that well-known elsewhere. In just three years, Fitzcarraldo Editions have published remarkably intelligent books on everything from orientalism to football.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |