Polish author Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2018 for works that included Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and the epic literary work The Books of Jacob. Tokarcauk did not rest on her laurels – her next book was The Empusium (published in Poland in 2022 and now in translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) which itself has started to garner awards.
The Empusium centres around young Polish man, Mieczlaw Wojnicz, who had to drop out of his hydroengineering studies due to illness. Wojnicz has been sent by his family to the town of Görbersdorf to attend a sanatorium where he might be cured. As there is no room at the sanatorium, Wojnicz lodges with a group of other mostly older men, at a nearby boarding house. Very quickly, Wojnicz notices something strange going on. Not just the untimely death of the wife of their host, but a series of strange deaths, stretching back years. Although it is hard for him to keep things straight as all are encouraged to drink a local liqueur, apparently made out of mushrooms, which has hallucinogenic effects. On top of all this, Wojnicz has a secret of his own, that makes him both nervous and keen to fit in.
The full title The Empusium includes the tagline “A Health Resort Horror Story”. And there are very weird goings on, strange deaths, possible forest creatures and maybe some form of ritual sacrifice. But there is more to the horror here than things that go bump in the night. Most of the discussions of Wojnicz’s fellow lodgers are focussed on the inherent inferiority of women. This is very deliberate – the Author’s Note starts with “All the misogynistic views on the topic of women and their place in the world are paraphrased from texts from the following authors” after which follows a comprehensive list of famous thinkers and writers including Charles Darwin, Plato, William S Burroughs and Thomas Aquinas. Armed with this information, and the fact that the novel as a whole is a homage to Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, which is set in a Swiss sanatorium and features a young engineer protagonist, gives readers a way to approach the text.
The Empusium is narrated from an almost omniscient point of view, but one that comes clear as the horror elements of this tale start to resolve themselves. Through it, Tokarczuk effectively captures a time and place – the routine of those seeking a cure for tuberculosis – and the continent on the brink of World War I (an event that will put an end to the need for further sacrifice).
Tokarczuk is working in a number of registers in The Empusium’s mix of faux philosophy and folk horror. But she uses the seeming dissonance to expose the misogyny not only inherent in early twentieth century European society but that continued to underpin modern thought. All of this, though, is actually focussed on highlighting Wojnicz’s own personal journey which turns out to be both revelatory and poignant.
The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk
No Comments
Comments are closed.