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In Poland I asked my guides to recommend a contemporary writer of literary fiction, and everyone gave me the same answer: Olga Tokarczuk.

So I asked for her books in the excellent bookstores of Warsaw and Krakow, and they had her books, but not the English translations.

Last week, Olga Tokarczuk won the Man International Booker prize, which means the English translations might make their way to Manila bookstores.

In the meantime, here’s an extract from her winning book, Flights.

LINES, PLANES AND BODIES

I often dreamed of watching without being seen. Of spying. Of being the perfect observer. Like that camera obscura I once made out of a shoebox. It photographed for me a part of the world through a black closed space with a microscopic pupil through which light sneaks inside. I was training.

The best place for this kind of training is Holland where people, convinced of their utter innocence, do not use curtains. After dusk the windows turn into little stages on which actors act out their evenings. Sequences of images bathed in yellow, warm light are the individual acts of the same production entitled ‘Life’. Dutch painting. Moving lives.

Here at the door appears a man, in his hand he has a tray, he puts it on the table; two children and a woman sit down around it. They take their time eating, in silence, because the audio in this theatre doesn’t work. Then they move to the couch, watch a glowing screen attentively, but for me, standing on the street, it isn’t clear what has absorbed them so – I only see flickers, flutterings of light, tiny pictures, too brief and distant to be intelligible. Someone’s face, a mouth moving intensely, a landscape, another face… Some say that this is a boring play and that nothing happens in it. But I like it – for example the movement of a foot playing unconsciously with a slipper, or the whole astonishing act of yawning. Or a hand that seeks upon a plush surface a remote control and – having found it – is calmed, withers.

Standing off to one side. Seeing only the world in fragments, there won’t be any other one. Moments, crumbs, fleeting configurations – no sooner have they come into existence than they fall to pieces. Life? There’s no such thing; I see lines, planes and bodies, and their transformations in time. Time, meanwhile, seems a simple instrument for the measurement of tiny changes, a school ruler with a simplified scale – it’s just three points: was, is and will be.

Continue reading at The Calvert Journal.