This book is a collection of 116 texts, ranging from very short fragments to longer narratives. A recurring theme is travel and movement, all told through the voice of an unnamed female traveller. Some pieces recount her own experiences, while others tell the stories of strangers. The texts are highly varied: reflections on the psychology of travel set in airports, factual accounts such as that of a Dutch anatomist or the story of Frédéric Chopin’s sister secretly transporting his heart back to Warsaw, strange meditations on preserving bodies after death, or the unsettling tale of a woman who disappears for three days with her son. The book unfolds as a series of vignettes, moving constantly between fiction and reality. The whole work is deliberately heterogeneous. While I found many of the individual pieces fascinating, amusing, or thought-provoking, I struggled to fully connect with the book as a whole. I have read other novels by Tokarczuk that resonated with me much more deeply.
“Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that – in spite of all the risks involved – a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”
Original title : Bieguni (lit : Runners)
Translated form Polish