Hi there, I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Does it ever strike you as odd that we manage to inhabit two completely different realities at once?

On one level, we have common sense and reason that orient us in the world.

We make narrative sense of our own

life and self and go about our day with a provisional yet perfectly satisfactory sense of what the

hell we're doing. And on another level, we know basically nothing. Forget about dark matter

and multiple universes. Just glance into the eyes of that stranger on the train. There's a whole

world in there that you know nothing whatsoever about.

I'm here today with Olga Tokarchuk, who won the Man Booker Prize this year for her book

Flights and with the book's translator, Jennifer Croft.

Flights is a patterned assemblage of sketches, short stories, fragmentary essays about travel, motion, and it kept striking

me while reading it that her writing is about these two worlds that we always waver between,

orientation and disorientation, trying to map things out and then getting lost inside our

own maps. Welcome to think again, Olga and Jennifer. Hi, hello. I'm wondering, like, what are

some of the big differences in how Americans are talking to you about your book from how

people talk to you in Poland? No, because there is no such a difference. You know,

that it is always proof me that the translation is good. It's the same question in my

country and in the other country, foreign country. So it means only that the

book was excellent translated. So thanks. Jennifer. So I paid her a lot of money.

Yeah.

So I don't want to push a point that if there's no point to pushing it.

But I mean, so there's no, you're not noticing any cultural differences in the kinds of

...