Ever since I saw the translation of Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob on the shelf at my library, I wanted to read it; however, I didn’t pick it up because I had so many other books I had to read for various projects and I didn’t have time to tackle such a 992 page novel. While I haven’t read The Books of Jacob, I did pick up a copy of Tokarczuk’s Flights, which originally appeared in Polish as Bieguni in 2008. I’ve had Flights for a few months, and I finally had the opportunity to start reading it. I had no clue what I was in for when I began, but as I read Tokarczuk’s novel about travel and motion I became engrossed with the narratives she weaves throughout the text. It’s a novel containing 116 vignettes relayed by a female narrator. They span stories from the seventeenth century to the present, and while they may not appear, at first glance, to be interrelated, they connect to one another through recurring themes and moments.

One of the most compelling interrelated narratives involves the contemporary, and fictitious Dr. Blau, and the historical Josefine Soliman, the daughter of Angelo Soliman. These intersecting narratives, one from the eighteenth century and one from the twenty-first century, explore a myriad of themes, most notably the exoticization of individuals, even after death, and the ways we remember and approach the past. Dr. Blau plastinates bodies, working on ways to refine the process to make the display of bodies for mass consumption at museums and other spaces more readily available. He studies the history of preservation and display of specimens, looking at Dutch botanist and anatomists Frederik Ruysch and others for inspiration.

Dr. Blau’s work is sterile, and he does it to further his own interests and proclivities. While working at the Medizinhistorisches Musuem, Dr. Blau would guide female students through teh corridors, showing them the collected “specimens,” in hopes of getting them into bed with him. During one of these “tours,” he takes two students to see some of the “mummies.” Dr. Blau tells them, “Stuffing corpses is the simplest way of preserving them. . . . In so doing . . . they really only leave the skin, which means this isn’t, in the full sense of the word, a body. It’s just a section of a body, the external form strecthed out over a dummy made of hay.” Dr. Blau tells them that mummification is an “obvious fraud” and a “circus trick” because the specimen isn’t a “body.” It isn’t an individual. It is merely a dummy presented for show. By presenting individuals in this manner, Dr. Blau and others skirt moral and “bureaucratic procedure.”

Academic, royalty, and others collected “specimens,” sometimes displaying them for the public to see. The narrator comments on Emperor Joseph II’s collection in Vienna and Francis I’s collection, notably that Francis “had not hesitated to stuff his black-skinned courtier, one Angelo Soliman, after his death, at which point his mummy, wearing only a grass band, was displayed for the viewing pleasure of all the monarch’s guests.” The move from Angelo’s name to mummy signifies the stripping of his humanity, and his body, being on display for the public to gawk at, to “examine,” points to the ways that Francis and Balu view their work.

Immidately following Dr. Blau’s narrative, we read Josefine’s first letter to Francis I following her father’s death, asking Francis for Angelo’s body so that the family can provide him with a proper burial. She asks Francis to rectify the “truly reprehensible iniquity” that Francis enacted upon her father’s very being. She details Angelo’s enslavement at a young age and his accomplishments to various European nobles. Josefine reminds Francis that the emperor “once consistently treated [Angelo] with distinction and respect.” Josefine continues by countering the cold and sterile view of Dr. Balu by restoring her father’s humanity when she pointedly states, “What makes us most human is the possession of a unique and irreproducible story, that we take place over time and leave behind our traces.” Angelo lived. His wrote his story, and even if he was not an enslaved servent to royalty he should “be buried with dignity, for the burial is merely the act of returning to our Creator His creation, the human body.”

Josephine drives home the dehumanization Angelo endured during his life, being passed around from enslaver to enslaver “as a sort of black pet, like a Maltese puppy or a Siamese cat.” Josefine asked why her father didn’t speak much about these moments, the fact that even though he succeeded intellectually and rubbed elbows with power he was nevertheless enslaved and seen not as a person but as an object. She postulates the he did this subconsciously, and this caused him not to speak against his position even as he progressed. Josefine states, “the faster painful events are erased from memory, the faster they will lose their power over us. They will cease to haunt us. The world will become better.” Forgetting is a survival mechanism, a way to cope.

However, what happens when forgetting becomes cultural? What happens when it infects the psyche of the collective, pushing individuals such as Angelo to the corners, out of view? Josefine comments on this as well. She tells Francis, “As long as people don’t find out how awful and abominable man can be to fellow man, their innocence will be left intact.” When we ignore atrocities, painting over them, we retain the facade of innocence, the facade that horrific actions of individuals in the past remain in the past. We create a facade that tells us we can never commit the same atrocities. That we are innocent of abominable acts against our fellow humans.

Yet, we know this is not true. Josefine contiues by bringing this thought back to her father, telling Francis, “What happened to my father’s body after his death, however, is a testament to the wrongheadedness of that conviction.” We cannot sweep over the atrocities. We cannot ignore them because they will always spring forth, calling upon us to remember. Yet, for Dr. Balu and others, the atrocities of the past don’t matter. What matters is what the “beneficial” results of those atrocities can provide for forward technological, scientific, and personal progress. When trying to learn about Mole’s advances in plastination, he speaks with Mole’s widow, and when she asks him if he has a partner, he tells her he does. He has a relationship with the “specimens” he studies “Soliman, Fragonard, Vesalius, von Hagens” and countless others. They do not exist as humans, as individuals with stories. They exist to him as a means to further himself.

I haven’t finished Flights yet, and I am sure I will have a lot more to say about Tokarczuk’s novel when I’m done. For now, though, I will leave it here. What are your thoughts? Please let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.