She relishes the sites of mobility-airports, cities, hotels, trains-and all the world’s exemptions, the things that got away: “the unique, the bizarre, the freakish.” These include the living-a woman she meets at the Stockholm airport who is compiling an unfinishable book on every crime ever committed, called “Reports on Infamy”-and the dead: collections of strange specimens, such as fetuses suspended in formaldehyde, relics in St. Early in “Flights,” she tells us that she is “drawn to all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken,” to “anything that deviates from the norm, that is too small or too big.” Later, she tells us that she loves “ Moby-Dick,” a book written out of “a genuine desire to portray the world.” Tokarczuk’s approach, like Melville’s, is encyclopedic and multiform. Like her characters, our narrator is always on the move, and is always noticing and theorizing, often brilliantly.

The book’s two great themes, twining the fictional and the nonfictional ficelles, are mobility and curiosity.

They are interspersed with longer fictional tales, set all over the world and in different epochs, as if they were found objects and Tokarczuk merely an itinerant gatherer: a Polish man, on a Croatian island for a holiday, searches for his wife and child, who have gone missing a classics professor, hired as a star lecturer for a Greek cruise, falls on board the boat, and dies in Athens a Russian mother, long tethered to the care of her severely sick son, walks out of her home and her life, and experiments with a new, perilous existence, riding the Moscow metro and spending time with the homeless a German doctor, obsessed with body parts (he keeps photographs of vulvae in cardboard boxes), travels to a conference to speak on his paper “The Preservation of Pathology Specimens Through Silicone Plastication.” Some of these riffs, which themselves tend toward the aphoristic, are as short as a couple of sentences. The narrator, an unnamed Polish writer with a hungry eye and an unappeasable need to travel, presents an omnium-gatherum, a big book full of many peculiar parts: there are mini-essays on airports, hotel lobbies, the psychology of travel, guidebooks, the atavistic pleasures of a single Polish word, the aphorisms of E. M. It is intermittently a work of fiction, but it is also an exercise in theory, cultural anthropology, and memoir.

“ Flights,” by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead), is exciting in the way that unclassifiable things are exciting-that is to say, at times confoundingly so.

Flights olga tokarczuk nobel prize