For this reason, with its emotionless indexing and mastery over the perennial movements of nature, it can be seen as the nuclei for how we control and are controlled today, which manifests itself most intensely – among certain groups of people – in anxieties regarding the crossing of borders. The Wunderkammer was once seen as a microcosm of the world and, more sinisterly, as a sign of the owner’s control over that world.
Cabinets of curiosity and strange collections feature heavily in Fights – people, to a certain extent, are cabinets of curiosity as well – but they aren’t just a subject, they also provide the model for the book’s structural organization and the means through which it discursively conveys its fleeting messages. The book, like the state of my copy, is a geography that keeps evolving as you read or more precisely, it’s a cabinet of curiosities in flux. It transformed over time, from a map – a static object – to a live territory as the white backing of the pristine Fitzcarraldo blue cover started to bite through, edges started to fold, marginalia multiplied and different abstract patterns of light and shadow cascaded over its surface as I read. Fittingly, for a book that explores travel, I found myself roving around the country by train while I was reading it, and the book, like the views outside of the carriage, became more smeared as I went. It’s often said that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, you can, however, judge my worn copy of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk – winner of the Man Booker International Prize – by its cover. Olga Tokarczuk, credit: Jacek Kołodziejski
0 kommentar(er)
