Why I'm done reading Flights

OK, I've had enough - Olga Tokarczuk's book Flights (2018) contains some amusing and insightful observations about time and space and a few short narrative segments that look at first like interpolated short stories but that just conclude abruptly - and all of this put together may constitute a long narrative (400+ pp) about time, space, distance, and dislocation (each of the 3 "stories" in the first 100 pages is about someone who takes flight - a mother and child who disappear on an island vacation, a ferryboat pilot who sets out to sea w/ a full load of passengers, a Mideastern king or prince who leaves his palace when facing a potential coup and brings with him all of his children) but to me none of these narratives go anywhere and the whole work just feels like an unsorted assortment of observations and fragments. Yes, one could read this book and come away thinking that our world is fragmentary, that our journeys lead us nowhere, etc., but do we need to turn to literature for that insight? On the contrary; in my view we expect literature to help us organize and make sense of our world by providing us access to a consciousness of another (the author, and her or his characters) and by arranging the fragments of our lives into a recognizable, detectable form - not necessarily beginning, middle, and end but at least some semblance of a structure or direction. It may be that I am reading Flights in the wrong way; perhaps it's best as a companion volume that one might turn to from time to time and read the pieces within in whatever order you like - that is, maybe it's not meant to be read straight through beginning to end - and some of OTs observations are amusing and trenchant, but overall this is a work that simply tries the reader's patience. As noted in yesterday's post, this work reads like a writer's notebook, full of potential material none assimilated, organized, or resolved. Maybe things cohere in the next 300 pages of OT's journey - please let me know, because I'm getting off at this station.