How to classify and how to approach the strange new novel Booker International Prize-winning novel

As with much contemporary fiction, European in particular, it's hard to know exactly how to classify or approach the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk's 2018 award-winning (Booker Prize International) novel, Flights. It starts off as what looks to be a conventional bildungsroman, as the narrator introduces herself to us and tells us about her personality quirks - in particular, her fascination w/ "freaks" and various monstrosities, both in legend and in life - and as she embarks on a journey of (I think) unexplained intent. The we shift abruptly - the entire (400+-page) book is made up of short sequences, some no longer than a paragraph none longer than 3-4 pp  - to a story about a man vacationing w/ wife and son(?) on a Mediterranean Island; wife asks him to stop the car; he does so, later steps out to take a piss, and his wife and child are missing; we follow him over the next few days as he reports this situation to the police and along w/ authorities they search for signs of his wife and child - everyone reassuring him that the island is small and they will be found - and eventually their suspicions, and ours, turn to the man himself. OK, but then this narrative abruptly ends w/ no conclusion and no explanation (it does remind me of the film L'aventura) - and then we're back to the narrator and, over the next 40 or so pp we  are reading short essays on travel: the strange culture of airports, an odd encounter w/ a fellow traveler who is writing a book about our gruesome mistreatment of animal life, random thoughts and apercus (e.g., is there  reverse Hisenberg principle that states that we can be absent from 2 different places at the same time?). Overall through the first 70-80 pp of this book, I see it as almost like a writer's notebook - fair enough, but can, should, an author get away w/ publishing her or his raw material w/out any effort to develop this material into a literary form? OT has been compared (on the jacket at least) w/ Sebald, but I don't see the connection there - as Sebald's work his focused on historical narrative and the unearthing of the mysterious, recent past from present-day landscapes and abandoned buildings. A closer comparison might be w/ Lydia Davis, whose extremely short stories come close to poetry, pensees, or even tag lines. The writing is good enough and strange enough (or at least Jennifer Croft's translation is) that I'll read further, but I am hoping (against hope) that the pieces of this disparate work will congeal and interact.