Any basic anatomy or neurology text will tell you we do not, as Tokarczuk alleges, owe our short-term memory to the hippocampus. According to NASA, it makes up about 27%, while 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter, for example, does not account for three-quarters of the universe. Whatever the case, a lot of the “information” Tokarczuk presents in her book is just flat-out wrong. (She marvels at the online, collaborative encyclopaedia more than once in Flights.) It seems that Tokarczuk did a fair bit of consulting of Wikipedia and who knows what other sources to create her book. It’s a collection of loosely connected stories (many of them inconclusive), anecdotes, facts, a lot of pseudo facts (information that masquerades as having a foundation in reality), ruminations, and attempts at playfulness, cleverness-some of them self-conscious or self-referential. As advertised, it is not a traditional or conventional novel-perhaps not a novel at all.

This is a fragmented, chaotic, and even careless book roughly organized around the topics of travel and anatomy. I’d like to have more to show for my time than I do.

While I don’t exactly regret reading it-which is something, I suppose, I was far less impressed with it than most. First hardcover edition with signature are rare.This is a book that demands a lot of mental work and, at slightly more than 400 pages, a considerable time investment. Spine slightly lean, minor soiling at rear panel, sticker with a price, bar code sticker on the last endpaper. Original pictorial cloth (showing map of Europe from around 1750), black lettering to the spine and front cover, descriptions and a short bibliography on the rear cover, a lot of maps throughout the text. The title of the book is also the name of an old Orthodox sect that believes that staying in one place exposes a man to attacks of the Evil, so constant movement serves the salvation of the soul. After mythographic prose, emotionally associated with the described place, the author surprised the readers with a novel that is a kind of study of travel psychology. 'Bieguni' is not a travel book, but a book about the phenomenon of travel. Olga Tokarczuk - outstanding prose writer and essayist, Nobel Literature Prize-winner (for 'Bieguni',), The Man Booker International Prize (2018), two-time laureate of The Nike Literary Award (for 'Bieguni' in 2008 and for ' Ksiegi Jakubowe' in 2015). First edition, first impression, boldly inscribed by author on the title page ('Agnieszce - Olga Tokarczuk 20.01.10 Barolo').

Bieguni by Olga Tokarczuk