Flights is a book that is miles out of my comfort zone. It takes the form of more of a memoir, and even has some elements that seem more non-fictiony than that. It really is something that on paper I would not enjoy at all, but I found it much more interesting than I ever thought I would.
The book is a series of different travel stories, covering travel in all different forms. There are flights in aeroplanes, as the title suggests, but there are also journeys on foot, by sea, journeys through the body, and journeys through life. There are lots of very short journeys described interspersed between much longer chapters. One of the most memorable longer ones is the journey of Chopin's heart. As a reader, you're not following a character in particular, as you're passed between different ones, and the journey takes place through many different mediums. Everything is bound up in the heart.
This felt very modernist in its almost dreamlike path that it took the reader on through the book. It really felt like one of those dreams you have where you open a door in your house and instead of leading to your bedroom it leads to a field or a different room entirely, and you travel through the book with these small connected entries into each story before it moves on to something entirely different.
I found this an interesting read as I said, but it's not something I enjoyed *that* much, so I've given it three stars. There were definitely journeys I enjoyed more than others, but I think it's the fact that it's not really a novel that I struggled with. If you're a fan of Gertrude Stein's poetry, I'd recommend this.
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