Now Ludwika, freezing and exhausted, is driving off in a stagecoach. What actually escaped his lips in the very end was a stream of dark, thick blood. In fact, as Ludwika recalled it, her brother said nothing in fact, he had been unconscious for a few hours. He wrote, among other things, that the last words of Fryderyk Chopin had been, “I am already at the source of all happiness,” which was a very obvious lie, although certainly beautiful and moving.

By his deathbed were several of his closest friends, among them his sister Ludwika, who attended to him munificently until the very end, as well as Father Aleksander Jełowicki, who, shaken by the quiet, animal deceasing of a thoroughly ruined body, by the drawn-out battle that was every gulp of air, first fainted in the stairwell and then, under the rubric of some rebellion he wasn’t altogether conscious of, thought up a better version of the virtuoso’s death in his memoirs. It is widely known that Chopin died at two o’ clock in the morning (“ aux petites heures de la nuit,” as French Wikipedia tells us) on October 17, 1849. She is the author of eight novels and two short story collections, and her work has appeared in n+1, BOMB, and Asymptote. Olga Tokarczuk is the winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, and the winner of the Nike, Poland's highest literary honor.

Through series of interwoven fragments, Flights explores what it means to inhabit a body and be a traveler through space and time. The following is from Olga Tokarczuk's novel, Flights.

Flights book olga tokarczuk