With its focus shifting from the cosmic to the personal, & the philosophical to the mundane, this book reminded me of Joe Frank's radio shows and Stanislaw Lem's One Human Minute. The narrator who observes while wandering the earth and wandering through memories also reminded me a lot of Joe Frank. Not sure this book can be called a novel, exactly, since it consists of a number of probably unrelated stories or novellas about travelling, strung together by the narrator who heard them somewhere or invented them somewhere else. If you want to call this a novel, I suppose it's about the narrator, or the author, telling us this all about her travels & travelling in general. Most of the stories contained in Flights wraps up in such a way that they leave one feeling there is more to be known, and in that way each vignette resembles a short story. I'm reminded of a class I took about fantasy literature, or maybe phantastical literature--that is, literature of the fantastical and strange, and not literature about fantasy worlds--where the feeling is always that there is more in the world & even in your immediate surroundings than you can possibly know. Time and life does not automatically dispel all mysteries, and much will always be hidden from all of us. Flights & story about the trip to Vis especially would fit in that class very well.