Constellation Novels: Olga Tokarczuk on Writing in Fragments

Nora Ellis

Welcome to Behind the Book. I'm Nora Ellis, and my guest today is Olga Tokarczuk: Nobel laureate in literature, winner of the International Booker Prize, author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, The Books of Jacob, and the novel we are here to discuss, Flights. Olga, welcome, and thank you.

Olga Tokarczuk

Thank you for inviting me. I like a conversation that is allowed to wander, which is appropriate for this book.

Nora Ellis

How would you describe Flights to someone standing in a bookshop holding it?

Olga Tokarczuk

It is a novel made of more than a hundred pieces: stories, fragments, notes about anatomy and travel and the strange dignity of airports. There is no single plot. There is a shape, and the reader assembles it. I call it a constellation novel, because you see the figure only when you step back.

Nora Ellis

Does a reader ever tell you they got lost?

Olga Tokarczuk

Often, and I am not sorry. Being lost is a legitimate state. The book is about movement, about bodies that will not stay still and will not stay preserved, so a form that behaved itself would be a lie about the subject.

Nora Ellis

You trained as a psychologist. What did that leave in the novelist?

Olga Tokarczuk

The habit of standing inside another person's logic long enough to describe it without mockery. Every patient is the hero of a coherent story. Once you have heard enough of them, you stop writing villains.

Nora Ellis

What do you want Flights to achieve?

Olga Tokarczuk

To practise tenderness towards what is not ourselves. Animals, strangers, objects, the dead. Literature is the only instrument that lets you be someone else for a few hours and return changed. That is not decoration, it is civic equipment.

Nora Ellis

You write in Polish and you are read in more than forty languages. How do you think about that reach?

Olga Tokarczuk

With enormous gratitude to translators, who are co authors and rarely paid like it. I want the book to keep crossing borders, and I want readers to argue with the translation, publicly if possible. A book that travels well is a book that changes a little in every country, and that is a success, not a loss.

Nora Ellis

One piece of advice for a writer starting out.

Olga Tokarczuk

Keep a notebook of things that have no use yet. Most of my books began as a page of unrelated notes that refused to be thrown away.

Nora Ellis

Olga Tokarczuk, thank you. Listeners, after every interview we help our guests find readers: Flights is on our promoted books page this month, in the newsletter and across our channels. Follow the show wherever you listen, and leave a review if it helped. I'm Nora Ellis, and this has been Behind the Book.