October, 2019

Bieguni, Olga Tokarczuk

POSTED IN classic poetry October 11, 2019

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The book “Flights” kept me reading without breaks. The title in English didn’t catch the real meaning of BIEGUNI. I would rather have called the book “Pilgrimages”. Anyway, this book isn’t an “116 stories” traveler’s atlas and Olga Tokarchuk isn’t a storyteller nor a pilgrim. I swallowed this book first to last page as a pilgrimage inside our brain to every cell of our body, the most marvelous map of the most marvelous world. I traveled helped by the pituitary gland and the amygdala to the most interesting landscape of our nerves, blood vessels, the smallest muscle – the tongue, and I kept near me the Cairos God, having Chopin’s heart and Filip Verheyen amputated leg. BIEGUNI is a circle: no beginning and no end. All the so called stories intertwine in a timeless and spaceless time, no past nor future between HERE I AM and I’M HERE. The human body, the most interesting planet, it is traveled by a pilgrim mind in a static motion, having a world in my head and under the command: “Citizens of the World Pick up Your Pens!”. I salivated at Swastikas and I understood that I myself am in constant motion to escape the Evil, I myself see an “Amphitheatre in Sleep”everywhere I am. Yes, the geography of our brain is in a constant motion: we are pilgrims in our own bodies.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3008600384

Maria Magdalena Biela