Arriving at the Truth via Fiction

Reading moves me, shakes me to the core, and reminds me that I am not alone. It shows me how even the most peculiar, most private emotions and states that pass through me every day might be shared by someone on the other side of the world: The language of literature is so universal that it binds us to each other.

Good literature goes even further: Like Kafka puts it, it is an axe for the frozen sea inside me. It knocks me down and finishes me off with an uppercut. I am so moved that after reading it I will never be the same again. Such a story that has deeply shaken me to the core and shaped my worldview is the Polish author Olga Tokarzcuk’s short story “Flights”. It is the story of a mother, Annushka, with a special needs child, who one day walks out of her door and does not come back. As she becomes one with the city, Moscow, as she becomes one with the crowds flowing into and out of the subway, as she meets a homeless woman and goes through a deep transformation that blurs boundaries between the center and the margins, as she extricates herself from the regular flow of time and space, we change alongside her. We are privy to her thoughts and emotions, and as she moves out of her reality into another one and comes back forever changed, we share her most despairing moments alongside her. What takes this story beyond and makes it great literature is how the author is not making Annushka into an object to be pitied: She keeps her protagonist human and naked in her pain and loneliness, and makes us mere witnesses to her story: She is telling us the truth via fiction.

Tokarzcuk is an author who has accomplished this simple yet difficult goal of telling the truth without taking sides. In doing so, she shows me one of the best ways in which I can write my own truth: Honestly, simply, yet in such a way that it cuts through to the heart of life, of love, of pain and despair, of being human.