07/15/2024
Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk (The Books of Jacob) delivers the disarming tale of a Silesian tuberculosis ward and a series of mysterious deaths in the surrounding countryside. Mieczysław Wojnicz, a frail engineering student, has been sent to the ward in 1913 to convalesce. While awaiting a room in the main facility, he chats in the guesthouse with a group of fellow patients, whose misogynistic views reflect the period’s prevailing attitudes. Tokarczuk places the modern institution against a rural backdrop where locals remain enthralled by ancient folk superstitions, and she explores this dissonance as Wojnicz learns of the witch trials that purportedly drove some women into the wilderness centuries earlier and gave rise to legends of female shape-shifters. Each November, the bodies of mutilated men are recovered from the woods, and hikers stumble upon Tuntschi, female dolls fashioned from natural materials to gratify sex-starved itinerant laborers. At the novel’s crisis point, Wojnicz uncovers a chilling connection between the legend and the sanatorium. Tokarczuk concocts a potent blend of horror tropes and literary references (Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann) as she realizes the potential of her tale’s uncommon setting—a community set apart by the omnipresence of sickness and death, where the rules of civilized propriety give way to more fantastic possibilities. Readers will find much to savor. (Sept.)
Praise for The Empusium:
“Deft and disturbing. . . In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s crisp translation, Tokarczuk tells a folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone. . . elegant and genuinely unsettling.”—Hari Kunzru, The New York Times Book Review
“Pulling from folktales, mythology, art, and literature, Tokarczuk’s novel spins a story that feels eerily familiar and yet totally new… Just when you think you have this novel in your sight, it shimmers into something else entirely.” —The Atlantic
“A marvelous reframing of The Magic Mountain … [that] can be enjoyed — and may even be more enjoyable — on its own merits … Lloyd-Jones’s uniformly excellent translation of The Empusium is a much breezier read." —Boston Globe
“Tokarczuk masterfully maps out a new kind of horror story, one that weaves together elements of folklore and feminist allegory.”—Harper’s Bazaar
“In Tokarczuk’s hands, the staid genre of the bildungsroman erupts with sinister possibility…. A grand fantasy of revenge …taut, febrile.”—Washington Post
“A novel that in Tokarczuk’s dexterous hands transcends its own limits, further cementing the Nobel laureate as one of the most original storytellers of our age. Equipped with only our measly five senses, it leaves us questioning — just like her characters — what might be hiding in plain sight.”—Financial Times
“A magnificently haunting portrayal of health, death, and all that comes in between, The Empusium is one of Tokarczuk’s best works to date.” —Chicago Review of Books
"An odd, fascinating book—a blackly serious joke—from an author of great daring and intelligence…. What stands out most is the philosophical conflict it stages between rationality and folk belief. This is the thread that runs through all of Ms. Tokarczuk’s wildly various books.”—Wall Street Journal
“A mischievous fairy tale about transformation, emotion and ambiguity…Tokarczuk keeps the suspense at a low boil throughout, balancing moments of terror and revulsion... Until the horror and the beauty can no longer be contained, that is, and erupt into the novel’s utterly sublime conclusion. As ever, Tokarczuk’s prose — and Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ glorious translation … — will knock the wind out of you.… The Empusium asks: If bigotry and violence make up the bedrock of our cultural traditions, can we still teach ourselves new ways of seeing and thinking? If we squint hard enough, can we find the women and other unpersons hidden in the past — and the present?”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Fiercely feminist … Tokarczuk’s erudite, subversive, and delightfully zany novel challenges us … to look hard at what’s being said and done around us, especially things we might prefer not to have to witness."—Book Forum
“This rich gothic novel set in 1913 is certainly haunted, but also rife with social commentary on gender dysphoria, inequality, and prejudice. Readers will come for the eerie atmosphere but stay for the searing critique of society's tendency to discard its most vulnerable if it means maintaining a semblance of safety.”—Booklist
“The Polish Nobel winner ladles up a deliciously creepy revenge tale in this satirical spin on Thomas Mann’s 100-year-old masterpiece The Magic Mountain.”—The Guardian
“Olga Tokarczuk’s deft, dark satirical wit is on full display in The Empusium, which challenges the rigid patriarchal world of pre-WWI Europe with horror and humor.”—BookPage
“The gothic elements keep the blood stirring.”—Library Journal
“Reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious—and spooky—web of intrigue and suspense. A crucial addition to Tokarczuk’s oeuvre.” —Kirkus, STARRED review
“Tokarczuk concocts a potent blend of horror tropes and literary references (Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann) as she realizes the potential of her tale’s uncommon setting—a community set apart by the omnipresence of sickness and death, where the rules of civilized propriety give way to more fantastic possibilities. Readers will find much to savor.” —Publishers Weekly
“Historical fiction threaded through with a playful kind of literary horror, The Empusium . . . is in part a wry response to Thomas Mann’s classic The Magic Mountain, blending high philosophy with dark comedy, strange folklore, and hallucinogenic liquors.”—Goodreads, “Most Anticipated Boos of the Fall”
07/19/2024
This is the fifth novel by Poland's Nobel laureate Tokarczuk (The Books of David) to be translated into English. Similarities with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain abound. Tokarczuk's novel is about a tuberculosis sanatorium less than 400 miles from where Mann's tale is set and also in the same time period, before the start of the Great War, with a naive innocent, the observer, and men who like to talk more than act. But unlike Mountain, this is no novel of ideas. Its interlocutors mouth only platitudes, especially opinions about women's inferiority and smaller brains and how they are good only for childbearing. (Their mouthings echo the judgments of the cream of the Western canon, notes Tokarczuk, from Hesiod and Augustine to Swift, Wagner, and Yeats.) Around this pseudo-philosophizing, Tokarczuk weaves a gothic story. Every year, at the same time, someone is butchered, and his remains scattered outside the town. Plot elements cross but don't intersect. The sanatorium's residents posture, trying to force a blurred world into black-and-white terms, while the time for another killing draws nigh. It's a puzzling join. VERDICT This novel won't be every reader's cup of tea, but the gothic elements keep the blood stirring. The book might also remind readers of the wilder writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer.—David Keymer
★ 2024-07-10
In a work that harks back toThe Magic Mountain, a young Pole seeks treatment for tuberculosis.
In the latest from Nobel Prize–winner Tokarczuk, a young man suffering from tuberculosis seeks respite for his illness at a sanatorium in the Silesian mountains. When Mieczysław Wojnicz finds the resort itself full, he rents a room at the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a small inn owned by Wilhelm Opitz, where, almost immediately, strange things start to happen: For one thing, Wojnicz starts hearing a cooing sound that seems to emanate from the attic; for another, the local herbal liqueur the men drink in the evenings might be affecting them in not-entirely-natural ways. But the main thrust of this novel, which repeatedly calls to mind Thomas Mann’sMagic Mountain, with which it shares a time period and setting, appears to be located in the debates that spring up between the men at the guesthouse, though Wojnicz rarely participates. “The subjects recurred, vanished and returned,” Tokarczuk writes. “Does man have a soul? Does he always act selfishly? Monarchy or democracy? Is socialism an opportunity for mankind? Can one tell whether a text was written by a man or a woman? Are women responsible enough to be allowed voting rights?” This is the direction in which the debates inevitably lead: the differences between men and women, and the ultimate, inevitable inferiority of women. The book, which is notably lacking in female characters, returns to this topic again and again, in increasingly subtle ways. But gender is just one of the mysteries at play here. Why won’t Wojnicz undress for the doctor? Why does another patient keep warning Wojnicz about violent deaths that supposedly occur at the sanatorium each year? Tokarczuk’s latest work reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious—and spooky—web of intrigue and suspense.
A crucial addition to Tokarczuk’s oeuvre.
