Empusion

by Olga Tokarczuk, Karol Lesman (translator)

De eerste roman van Olga Tokarczuk sinds haar Nobelprijs is een briljant feministisch antwoord op De Toverberg

In september 1913 reist student Mieczysław Wojnicz vanuit Lemberg naar een beroemd sanatorium in de bergen van Pruisisch Silezië. Hij neemt zijn intrek in een herenpension, waar patiënten uit heel Europa net als in Thomas Manns De Toverberg onophoudelijk met elkaar filosoferen. Ondertussen raakt Mieczysław gefascineerd door de vele verontrustende gebeurtenissen die zich in de omgeving voordoen. Wat hij nog niet weet, is dat duistere krachten het ook op hem gemunt hebben.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Poland, Literary Fiction, Historical, Feminism

371 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2022

About the author

Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. She was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life".

For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. For Flights and The Books of Jacob, she won the Nike Awards, Poland's top literary prize, among other accolades; she won the Nike audience award five times.

Her works have been translated into almost 40 languages, making her one of the most translated contemporary Polish writers. The Books of Jacob, regarded as her magnum opus, was released in the UK in November 2021 after seven years of translation work, followed by release in the US in February 2022. In March that year, the novel was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

Source: wikipedia
Photo: Łukasz Giza

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Magic Mountain, but make it feminist: In her first novel after being awarded the Nobel, Tokarczuk tackles another Nobel recipient's work, and the result is dark and hilarious. Short recap: In "The Magic Mountain", Thomas Mann sends engineer Hans Castorp into a sanatorium near Davos / Switzerland, where he spends seven years ruminating world affairs and philosophy with fellow patients. The parody on the classic German Bildungsroman ends with the beginning of WW I. Set in 1913, Tokarczuk sends another aspiring engineer (fun fact: Castorp specializes in building ships, this protagonist in sewage infrastructure - love that twist), Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, to a sanatorium in Görbersdorf / Lower Silesia, where, you guessed it, he ruminates with other patients about the state of the world. The Magic Mountain, now even more mountainous?

The real sanatorium in Görbersdorf was the first in the world to specialize in the treatment of tuberculosis, and the methods applied there to treat lung diseases inspired Mann's novel. Tokarczuk's sickly protagonist Wojnicz resides near the sanatorium in a guesthouse for men, where he and the other patients living there spend quite some time talking about the nature of women - and the brilliant idea here is that the author lets those guys paraphrase real misogynistic utterances from famous... ähem ... thinkers (not in this respect though) like Charles Darwin, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche etc. pp. The montage is genius, because it brings out how outrageously stupid these sentences are and presents the men repeating them in slight variations as fearful, as terrified of women, which prompts them to try and control them (Tokarczuk sounds like she knows her Klaus Theweleit).

So while there are almost no women, the men are obsessed with women - and the men are also narrated by women. Not only is the author of the novel female, no, the mysterious "we" that functions as the narrator seems to be the title-giving choir of female ghosts that haunt the forests nearby, the spectres of dead women, of women who fled their homes (as the story tells us), who were murdered in the witch trials in Görbersdorf in the 17th century, and who appear as hallucinogenic mushrooms reminiscent of the female anatomy, mushrooms that the patients turn into liquor and permanently ingest. Empusa is a shape-shifting female ghost from Greek mythology, and while in Mann's Magic Mountain, women are either seductresses (I mean, who names their character "Clawdia Chauchat", the clawy hot cat? Thomas, WTF?) or not exactly bright, Tokarczuk turns them into the ones claiming the narrative about misogynistic men. Love it, 10 out of 10 from me.

But there are more narrative strands: Right at the beginning, the abused wife of the owner of the guesthouse kills herself, plus we learn that (male) patients mysteriously die every November. What does it have to do with the female spirits, and with the fact that all men are permanently on mushroom liquor? There's a horror mystery element in there, but one relating to femicide. The whole text sounds as if was written during the narrated time, and it adds a hallucinatory quality, a foggy, oppressive atmosphere. The suppressed sex drive is channeled in violence, grandiosity, and bizarre sex dolls, and it makes the men appear small and pathetic.

A main theme here is perspective though: Not only is there a fantastic plot twist in the final quarter of the book, vision and art play a pivotal role to illuminate the dynamics between genders. In a central scene, patient and gay art student Thilo discusses painter Harri met de Bles with Wojnicz, and explains how his depiction of nature changes according to where you stand before the image (also note that Wojnicz is cross-eyed!).

This novel, illustrated with historic materials, is a treasure trove of ideas, and while the sound - rooted in the beginning of the 20th century and partly a pastiche of Mann - is probably not to everyone's taste, I enjoyed the witty construction and the many serious points Tokarczuk makes in an expertly hilarious manner. Full disclosure: I hated Flights, but now I get why this woman received the Nobel.

[Talkincloud · Rating 5 out of 5]

Przed chwilą skończyłem „Empuzjon” i ostatnie zdanie zostawiło mnie z myślą, że przeczytałem książkę kompletną: gatunkową marmoladę rozsmarowaną na wielkim płótnie tak zwanej „literatury pięknej”. To była powieść ponura, przerażająca, acz od pierwszej do ostatniej strony intrygująca. Pisząc najprościej — Tokarczuk stworzyła piękny horror, odpowiadając tym samym na to, czego aktualnie (mam wrażenie) pragniemy w naszych czytelniczych życiach. Jest nuta niepokoju, są istotne tematy społeczne i zachęta do refleksji nad życiem oraz postawą wobec spraw kluczowych tj. równości (na wielu płaszczyznach). Dzieło bazujące na spojrzeniu na rzeczywistość z cienia, z mroku. Narracja implikuje wielką niewiadomą, coś nie z tego świata, co bacznie obserwuje naszą główną postać, Mieczysława Wojnicza.

Wojnicz przybywa do Pensjonatu dla mężczyzn, żeby się kurować, pokonać gruźlicę. Jest człowiekiem wrażliwym, delikatnym i nie da się do niego nie pałać sympatią. Jednakże widać od początku, że postrzegany jest przez innych jako jednostka słaba (nie tylko ze względu na chorobę, która nawiedziła jego ciało). Swoją siłę ma dopiero odkryć. Na przestrzeni kilku pierwszych rozdziałów dochodzi do pewnego samobójstwa, a przynajmniej tak się Wojniczowi na pierwszy rzut oka wydaje. Im dalej w las, tym jest mroczniej, trudniej, a z każdego zakątka krzyczy mężczyzna nienawidzący jakiejś kobiety. Mizoginia sączy się z ust bohaterów otaczających Wojnicza, a on trochę nie wie, co z tym począć i jak reagować. Ciekawe jest to, że w tej książce kobiet, teoretycznie, nie ma, a jednak stanowią zalążek wszystkiego, o czym można w „Empuzjonie” przeczytać. I to jest wspaniałe. Tokarczuk umiejętnie pokazuje nam, że czasami nie chcemy dopuścić do siebie pewnych prawd i powiedzieć rzeczywistości „tak”. Ona robi to za nas, poprzez tę książkę.

Od startu narasta napięcie i dążymy ku kulminacji, która niektórym może wydać się zbyt magiczna i oniryczna (albo i fantastyczna), ale autorka czerpie z różnych gatunków — nie ogranicza się w formie przekazu, który wybrzmiewa bardzo wyraźnie.

Nic więcej nie powiem — polecam przeczytać!

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Have you seen...the cemetery...in Langwaltersdorf?" asked Thilo, breaking the silence, breathing heavily. "It's worth a look. It’s a special map of the world of the living."

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk is a wild mix of gothic, philosophical, and psychological elements. Set in 1913, the novel follows Mieczysław, a man with tuberculosis as he checks into Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf. A health resort/Sanitorium of sorts in the Silesian mountains.

Straight off the bat, the setting gives off major Dracula vibes, with a group of eccentric patients engaging in deep (sometimes unsettling and misogynistic) conversations on life, death, women and the nature of existence.

Tokarczuk’s signature style, mixing the mystical with the mundane, is all over this book. There’s a constant feeling of something lurking just below the surface, which makes the slow build incredibly tense. It’s a novel that asks a lot of big questions, but instead of offering clean answers, it leaves you with a haunting sense of unease.

The book feels like a fever dream, strange, immersive, and thought provoking. It’s not a light or easy read, but if you enjoy meditative, eerie, and complex narratives, you will love this one.

The Empusium is a novel that challenges and rewards, appealing to readers who appreciate literature that intertwines psychological depth with gothic horror.

My Highest Recommendation.

Thank you Text Publishing for gifting me an advanced copy of The Empusium for review.

Available now!

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Olga fucking went there. Olga woke up one day and thought “I have absolutely fucking had it” and wrote this book. She snapped and good for her. This book is absolutely iconic.

It is set in Poland in 1913 and follows Wojnicz who is a student suffering from a debilitating tuberculous infection. He travels to a health resort which promises a new, ‘natural’ sort of treatment and he and the other ailed guests spend their days strolling through the woods, drinking liquor and discussing philosophy over dinner together every night.

It focuses heavily on a group of men who all seem to make friends with each other but keep saying and doing the dumbest things I’ve ever read on paper. And I kept thinking to myself “why are these men to stupid” through the whole book, and Olga’s true genius of why she created the characters this way is revealed at the very end. I really enjoyed the sense of kinship that was developing between them all amongst the growing paranoia of each other the sicker and sicker they got. They hear each other moving around a night and tell stories of bodies found in the woods in November, swearing it to be true. Despite their hearty discussions every evening there is a damning sense of mistrust that the main character can’t shake about the entire resort, its doctors and its patients.

The horror in this book is so subtle it feels at times almost undetectable, but once you finish the book you realise it’s been there all along. The Empusium is not a novel which spells things out for you and the reader must work out a lot of the clues and references throughout the book to decipher what’s going on and what it’s actually trying to say. This book does not spoon-feed you and it’s not a horror which screams in your face. It’s whole vibe feels ghostly and like there is some sort of presence within the words that you can’t put your finger on, and only with a careful understanding of language and the body of work she is referencing will one feel as though they get the horror of the book.

Not unlike Drive Your Plow, it’s written reminiscent of an eighteenth century classic, which I think is a nod to her deep appreciation of romanticism but also in a way it allows her to reclaim a lot of the narratives from this period which were very much dominated by male voices. It had a really strong Edgar Allan Poe feel to it, with the way the omniscient narrator kept making themselves known to the reader and there was an eerie foreshadowing at the end of almost every chapter.

Small bits of information are revealed to you through this book but it is truly in the last third where it comes to its absolutely climax and just blows everything out of the water. I couldn’t read fast enough because I was in awe of what was happening. There is a slight lull in the middle section where a lot of the men are just going on walks and there doesn’t seem to be much happening. But it’s worth it to get to the ending - and then to the acknowledgements.

I MEAN it when I say you HAVE to read the acknowledgment page at the end of this book. My jaw literally dropped open when I read it and it made the entire novel just make complete sense to me. Like she actually did that, she truly went there. Olga took absolutely no prisoners with this book and I genuinely can’t think of a book which has been so clever that I’ve read recently. I really just want to start the whole thing over again so I can appreciate it even more with the hindsight knowledge of what is to come.

[Stitching Ghost · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was this book intelligently and skillfully written? Yes, absolutely it was. Was it particularly engaging or entertaining for me? No, not really.

[Queralt✨ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Let me explain this book with a nonsensical metaphor: you buy a microwavable lasagna. The package says to pierce the lid a few times before throwing it in the microwave. So you do. But then, you keep stabbing the lid with a fork. And you keep going. And you keep going. And you keep going. Now there’s no lid, it's fallen. You've broken it because you didn't know when to stop. You microwave your lasagna: it's edible but soggy, the texture's off. You should've pierced the lid just a few times.

This book is the same. We follow a bunch of European dudes from up there (what I will affectionately call “wealthy gentlemen from Germany and the goulash-eating countries”). They talk about women, sit around, eat food, and are pretentious together while philosophizing about mankind and other nonsense. All their conversations are like this:

“Because a woman’s body belongs not only to her, but to mankind,” said Lukas, a little irritated that they had not drunk a second round. “Since she gives birth, she’s public property, this capacity of hers to give birth cannot be treated as her personal quality,” he said, stressing that word, then courteously returned a greeting to a couple passing by. “At the same time as being herself, a woman belongs to us all.”

The author uses the misogynistic ramblings of famous (male) philosophers to make a feminist point. That’s really cool. This is clear by page 30.

Then we get 240 more pages of this.

And the “cool idea” turns into “whoops, I skimmed three chapters, and the guys are STILL talking about women being soulless objects/subjects.” NOTHING has happened. NOTHING. We stared at one shoe (this was so recurrent and annoying lol) and they continued their pretentious, manly ramblings.

It picks up around the last 50 pages. I wish I had cared, but this book had put me in a reading slump, and I was just annoyed. I think this is a cool idea and I thought the narrator/POV was interesting (not something I usually care about, but I can see this being cool for other readers) (also, they stare at 'one shoe' 30 times, I used the Search thingy in my ebook reader to check).

I’m happy I finished it because I now see this book was going somewhere, but this could’ve been an e-mail. I do want to say, low rating and HATING the book aside, I find the idea of writing a female rage book "without women" (ish) impressive and it worked.

[Guille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Se acaba de producir un empate en mi partido con Olga Tokarczuk. Tras dos golazos de impecable factura como fueron «Un lugar llamado antaño» y «Los errantes», mi lectura de «Sobre los huesos de los muertos" acortó distancias. Parecía que «Tierra de empusas» sentenciaría el partido, pero contra todo pronóstico ha supuesto el empate y no sabemos si este será el resultado final.

“Empezaba el festejo de la caída de las hojas, como si la cercanía de la muerte activara en esos árboles caudales de energía extraordinaria que, sin embargo, en lugar de servir al mantenimiento de la vida, les permitían celebrar la agonía”

Decía Borges que "La muerte es una vida vivida. La vida es una muerte que viene". Pensé que Olga Tokarczuk iba a resucitar aquí el experimento de Thomas Mann en «La montaña mágica» al poner a un grupo de hombres en un momento cercano a la muerte o en claro peligro de ello, acelerando el proceso que describe la segunda parte de la cita de Borges a costa de acortar el transcurso de la vida vivida, que es la muerte. Lamentablemente, poco se habla aquí de la muerte, de cómo nos condiciona, de cómo afrontarla, de lo que se espera tras ella. Será que la autora quiso ser consecuente con aquello que comenta uno de sus personajes: “El ser humano no cree en su propia muerte”.

“Unos hombres enfermos deseosos de creer que les quedaba aún mucha vida por delante”

Entonces, ¿qué persigue Tokarczuk con este supuesto homenaje a la obra de Thomas Mann? En mi opinión, utilizar un texto sobre el pensamiento occidental de principios del siglo XX en el que la mujer brilla por su ausencia para, a partir de un "nosotras" que toma el papel de narradora, poner de manifiesto la misoginia y el menosprecio hacia la mujer que se ha dado a lo largo de la historia (en la novela se reproducen un buen montón de comentarios acerca de la mujer de los que no reproduciré aquí ninguno por la estupidez que entrañan y por lo muy superado que me parece que están la gran mayoría de ellos en la actualidad, dejando aparte a algún que otro descerebrado, razón por la que tampoco entiendo el propósito y la oportunidad de ello en la obra de la autora polaca. Al final del libro hay una lista impresionante de artistas e intelectuales que parecen ser la fuente de todos esos comentarios).

“… cualquier polémica, ya fuera sobre la democracia, sobre la quinta dimensión, sobre el papel de la religión, sobre el socialismo, sobre Europa o sobre el arte moderno, al final se reducía a las mujeres”

En efecto, muchos son los diálogos que los huéspedes de la pensión para caballeros, todos a la espera de una plaza en el sanatorio de tuberculosos, entablan inspirados “alucinantemente” por un licor a base de setas y en torno a dos polos encarnados por un socialista humanista y un autoritario católico. Si bien, más que discusiones como las que podemos encontrar en «La montaña mágica» entre Settembrini y Naphta, las conversaciones aquí son más bien una parodia de ellas, un mero encadenamiento de enunciados, sin profundización alguna, sobre temas de lo más variopintos: si tienen alma los seres humanos, si son buenos o malos por naturaleza, monarquía o democracia, socialismo, libertad… queriendo, imagino, llamar la atención sobre la tendencia, muy masculina al parecer, de exhibir el mucho conocimiento y la excepcional oratoria sin querer realmente tener en cuenta la perspectiva ajena ni llegar a conclusión alguna.

“Cazaban faisanes, extrañas aves que arrancaban a correr a su paso y levantaban el vuelo pesadamente, con un ruidoso aleteo. Su torpeza daba rabia; uno acababa pensando que tenían la culpa de su propia muerte”

Lo que nos lleva al otro gran tema de la obra, absolutamente ligado al anterior: la necesidad de romper con todo lo que, en opinión de la autora, ha representado el patriarcado en el pensamiento occidental. La masculinidad opresora parece estar vinculada, mezclando churras con merinas, con lo racional, con una ciencia que solo tiene en cuenta lo que puede ser observado, con la visión de un mundo en blanco y negro en el que no hay grises y en el que todo lo raro o diferente es sospechoso, con la idea de que al ser humano, malo por naturaleza, hay que atarlo corto, de que siempre tiene que imperar un orden.

“El arte moderno, progresista, surgido en el siglo XX, es mucho más ambicioso. Quiere ir más allá de esas limitaciones, revolucionar la percepción, desea ver cosas nuevamente, desde muchos puntos de vista a la vez, incluso desde aquellos que en teoría son imposibles”

En frente está la supuesta “mirada femenina”, en la que precisamente lo más importante es lo que no se ve, donde no todo tiene una explicación racional, que admite realidades más allá de la que percibimos y con las que debemos contar y relacionarnos. En este sentido, la cita que antecede al texto es toda una declaración de intenciones:

“Todos los días suceden en el mundo cosas que no se explican por las leyes que conocemos de las cosas. Todos los días, habladas durante un momento, se olvidan, y el mismo misterio que las ha traído se las lleva, convirtiéndose el secreto en olvido. Tal es la ley de lo que tiene que ser olvidado porque no puede ser explicado. A la luz del sol, continúa siendo normal el mundo visible. El ajeno nos acecha desde la sombra” (Fernando Pessoa, Libro del desasosiego)

Algo muy parecido a lo que un personaje argumenta en las últimas páginas de la novela:

“Tenemos que abrirnos a otras dimensiones de la experiencia humana... A lo que ha sido olvidado y rechazado como algo infantil e indigno del ser humano moderno. Nuestros antepasados tenían razón: ellos siguen estando con nosotros, nos hablan, exigen atención. Todas esas injusticias ocurridas en el pasado no han dejado de existir, siguen resonando y nos provocan un temblor interno”

Todo ello viene aderezado con la búsqueda de la identidad de su protagonista, un ser ambiguo que oculta un secreto y que, en palabras del médico que le asiste, es alguien que “despertará rechazo y odio porque hará ver con toda claridad que la visión del mundo como blanco y negro es una visión falsa y destructiva”, en un contexto extraño en el que se producen unas misteriosas muertes de hombres, siempre en los meses de noviembre, que la leyenda imputa a unas mujeres que huyeron al monte tras ser acusadas de brujería y que ahora se manifiestan asociadas con el mito de las empusas, una amenaza, un riesgo, otro lugar común de la novela que asocia a las mujeres con lo atávico, la naturaleza, la tierra, que está más allá de la razón y de la necesidad “masculina” de dominarla.

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Olga Tokarczuk’s ambitious, thought-provoking novel’s loosely based on Thomas Mann’s bildungsroman The Magic Mountain which she frequently rereads. Through the experiences of protagonist Hans Castorp, Mann’s novel examines pre-WW1 European society: competing strands of political thought; the search for meaning in a world in which Nietzsche’s declared God dead. Tokarczuk borrows from Mann’s framework but changes the setting from Swiss TB sanitorium to a version of Hermann Brehmer’s famous sanitorium in an isolated, mountainous valley in Görbersdorf, compressing the action so her story unfolds over several months in 1913.

Tokarczuk’s book features Mieczysław Wojnicz, Polish, in his twenties, like Castorp he’s diffident and sensitive, slightly adrift. Wojnicz travels to Brehmer’s sanitorium for its wellness cure, renting a room in a gentlemen’s guesthouse close to the main complex. His fellow residents seem desperate to command Wojnicz’s attention. These men have an abundance of spare time, caught between hoping to survive and waiting for death. Each night they swig Schwarmerei, a local concoction with hallucinogenic qualities, and engage in heated debates about the nature of things. Each striving to convert Wojnicz to their particular viewpoints. The men vary in their affiliations ranging from conservative Catholic to theosophist yet are united in fear and loathing of women. Theirs is a heteropatriarchal society in microcosm, women are relegated to the margins: useful for domestic labour and/or sex but little else.

Wojnicz listens to the men but rarely reciprocates possibly because he has a secret to keep. He quickly realises he’s not alone in that, the boarding-house and its surrounds are shrouded in mystery: the manager’s wife dies in suspicious circumstances; at night Wojnicz hears strange whisperings in the attics overhead; and there are rumours of macabre occurrences in the woods above the town. These sinister elements build on Mann but give Tokarczuk’s narrative a more pronounced gothic flavour mixed with flashes of folk horror, laced with unsettling undercurrents. The novel’s narration intensifies the atmosphere of unease, borrowing from Aristophanes Tokarczuk shifts between an enigmatic choral perspective and one more aligned to Wojnicz’s. Allusions to classical Greek and Roman texts pervade her story, from the play on Plato’s Symposium in her title, to the mythical Empusa, a terrifying, shape-shifting woman– whose name also conjures Polish tales of witchcraft and malevolent, blood-sucking beings.

As usual, Tokarczuk’s piece is highly referential weaving in aspects of history, myth and folklore: from Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu to the Alpine fable of the Sennentuntschi, a variation on a rape-revenge fantasy involving sex dolls crudely-fashioned by mountain workers – although a more recent find suggests such dolls may not be purely fictional. Tokarczuk picks up on a number of Mann’s themes, his ideas on myth and recurring patterns overlap with her own interest in Jung. But this is recognisably Tokarczuk’s territory from the oblique commentary on speciesism to the condemnation of racism and antisemitism. Like Mann’s, Tokarczuk’s novel traces a line from certain forms of belief to the advent of war. But she also hints at connections between some characters’ worldviews and the later rise of National Socialism, the twisted morality that justified the Holocaust – underlined by making Lviv Wojnicz’s home and placing him in a sanitorium in Silesia. But Tokarczuk’s flagging concerns too over events in contemporary Europe: climate change; the resurgence of far-right nationalism; the war in Ukraine.

However, Tokarczuk’s overriding preoccupation here’s with toxic masculinity, body fascism, destructive gender binaries/species divides, the misogynistic, phallocentric belief systems that have dominated European thought. She deftly exposes these prejudices by having numerous characters spout appalling ideas about women drawn directly from the work of prominent male thinkers and writers from Darwin and Freud to Yeats and Sartre. Tokarczuk then challenges these gendered attitudes through Wojnicz’s personal journey to an unexpected, radical awakening. She constructs scenarios promoting alternative ways of seeing, emphasizing the organic, interspecies networks, fluidity over rigidity – possibly drawn from queer mycology. But she blends concepts centred on the potential for transcendence and the queering of gender with a plea for equal status for so-called ‘women’s’ work within human society – aiming for a world in which the feminine-coded domestic sphere carries as much weight as the male-coded public.

But I found this combination slightly vexing, Tokarczuk’s organic network’s one in which gender should theoretically be dissolved, merging into a greater, interspecies collective. Yet Tokarczuk’s version retains sufficient ‘feminine’ rage to fight against male oppression suggesting conventional gender binaries still retain some force; similarly, Tokarczuk’s specific set of arguments in favour of elevating the status of domestic labour – which I’m obviously all for – sometimes seemed to skirt dangerously close to reinforcing essentialist feminine archetypes. It’s possible that part of the problem, at least for me, was that Tokarczuk's trying to pack too much in, making her narrative overly dense, difficult to negotiate at times, muddling her arguments. But, doubts aside, there’s a lot here I fully support. Overall, a stimulating, engrossing read. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Fitzcarraldo for an ARC

Rating: 3.5

[Beata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!

[Maxwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel very conflicted about this book, because on one hand, I think it’s very well done and clever, and on the other I just wanted a little bit more, especially things to happen.

Without giving anything away, I feel that most of the action or excitement of this book happens in the last 5 to 10%. So I think this has been in. I would’ve liked it a lot more because of the middle half of the book is quite slow.

It’s more of an intellectual horror that looks at society and makes social commentary, especially examining old ways of thinking about gender roles and male power in history.

The vibes are definitely creepy, and I could see this being made into a very unsettling film. I actually really liked how sinister it was at times without ‘jump scares’ so to speak. At the same time that made a lot of the book about tension building and a slow rollout of information, that for me just felt like it took way too long.

This is my third book by Olga Tokarczuk and I’ve never been blown away, so I think it’s fair to say it’s me and not her. As much as I want to love her books, I just don’t. I’d still recommend this one if you like literary horror and are OK with something a bit slower.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has been said before: receiving the Nobel Prize in literature can be fatal for the creativity of an author. The list of writers who didn’t produce anything of worth afterwards is quite long. But here Olga Tokarczuk (Nobel Prize 2018) proves to be fairly immune to the phenomenon. With Empusion she has delivered a cool novel with many gothic elements, and a twist at the end, as we are used to from her, but also with a more profound philosophical reflection. How could it not be: in this novel she strongly refers to Thomas Mann's masterful The Magic Mountain: the young Polish student Mieczyslaw Wojnicz who comes to undergo a treatment in the mountains of Silesia looks very much like Hans Castorp in Davos, including the endless conversations he witnesses on the tricky relation between reason and emotion.

But when, in the second chapter, a female corpse turns out to be lying on the dining room table of his residence, it is clear that Tokarczuk is going to offer a different approach than Mann. The accumulation of misogynistic statements by his fellow-patients - as Tokarczuk points out at the end, they are simply quotes from prominent names from Western intellectual history - is only one of the threads in this book. But, towards the end, it is this thread that will culminate in a revelation about the strange 'disease' that the delicate Mieczyslaw suffers from.

Related to this, but in a much broader context, she shows through the young man's observations and reflections how elusive and tenuous or thin (the term is a well-chosen reference to the low mountains where the novel is set) reality is for us, and how we can best also take into account a dark side that remains hidden, but that irrevocably intervenes in our lives. The motto at the front of the book, by Fernando Pessoa, already announced it: “Sunlight remains the director of the observable world. The unknown lurks at us from the shadows.” And so the book is peppered with passages in which Mieczyslaw practices looking into that shadow, exploring other than apparently rational or reasonable approaches: “He now stood naked opposite the open cupboard. The small, cracked mirror above the washbasin reflected his body, which was divided into pieces, as if this image were part of a larger puzzle, for which each of us was given a whole life to put together. In his brain he saw, as in the windows of a huge room, what forms his future would take. He felt numerous, multiple, multi-dimensional, composite and complex like a coral reef, like a mycelium, whose true existence was underground.” And so this novel, much more than Mann's The Magic Mountain, appears to move away from binary thinking (visible-invisible/man-woman/reason-feeling, etc.) and seeking out more fluid spheres and ways of looking. It's a typical Tokarczuk theme, that is also illustrated in this book by the appearance of intermediate beings (here 'Tuntschi'). They will contribute to the Walpurnis-like denouement of the story.

I've enjoyed this read, set in a very classic style, and spiced with lots of gothic elements. But I have to concede that Tokarczuk is no Mann. For once I think this is a book that could have been served in a more elaborate way. Keeping it rather short, her story has a far less mesmerizing quality than her famous example.

[Ulysse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Made of sticks and slimy mushrooms
I am the teller of this tale
I have eyes in many rooms
Observing what goes on in there

Look how they occupy themselves
These men who seem to know them all
The gilded titles on the shelves
That line the study down the hall

Men whose opinions fill like smoke
The narrow corners of the mind
Who turn woman into a joke
Of which they can't recall the punchline

Watch as they remove the layers
They have wrapped about their persons
And indulge in lonely prayers
Released from private prisons

Some will hack and cough all night
Toss and turn in narrow beds
Others touch themselves and fight
The female demons in their heads

They’re all here to find a cure
For their infected lungs
It has been over a year
Since they could sing their bawdy songs

But me and my fellow creatures know
That these mountains are but a trap
And we stand here in patient snow
Like a branch about to snap

[spillingthematcha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mam wrażenie, że Tokarczuk napisała książkę zupełnie inną od poprzednich. Podszytą niepokojem, niemal grobowym mrokiem historię, która uchwyca wszystko to, co nieuchwytne, a przy tym porusza wiele aktualnych tematów. Prawdziwie intrygująca.

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

An erudite work in conversation with The Magic Mountain. The sick, the outsiders, the old are all at risk of being sacrificed, while misogyny, in the form of actual quotes of real authors, is rife.
As we know however the most interesting things however are always in the shadows, in the invisible

To say I always knew what was going on in The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, the newest translated novel from Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, is a stretch, even having just read the Magic Mountain.
We are in a 1913 setting, in a mountain spa resort. Our The Magic Mountain engineer from Hamburg, focused on shipbuilding becomes a sewage engineer, and Polish.
This young Pole, suffering from lung disease as the story begins, arriving in the spa town of Görbersdorf, today in Southern Poland, back in 1913 then the Austro-Hungarian empire. Because the official Kurhaus is full, he stays in a Pension for Gentlemen. The 'gentlemen' take themselves very seriously and inversely take women very serious as objects of mockery and discussion.

At least the surrounding mountains are used more for hikes than in Thomas Mann his work, but the discussions about ideas are similarly philosophical, if more often focused on the inferiority of the female. This clearly makes our main character uncomfortable, and there are not just secrets to uncover in respect to Mieczysław, but also in the surrounding woods and the village itself, that is not as quaint as it seems. At times the book feels almost fever dream like and I am not fully sure what really happened or not, but definitely a thought provoking novel that I might, because of the more manageable length and "horror" tension, have even enjoyed more than the 100 year work it is in conversation with. Also major shout out to Natasha Soudek who does incredible work as narrator of the audiobook.

Already in the first chapter we have a person dying, and things develop further atmospherically. The appreciation of the main character for the male form, including firemen, seems rather homo-erotic, creating tension in the toxic masculine environment. Humboldt (both an icon of imperialistic, rationalist 19th century science and virility, and very gay) comes back a lot in the perfect spa village, where death is lurking below the surface, and every party is augmented by mushroom liquor Schwärmerei.

Meanwhile normal life is continuing in certain form, with fried trout in almond sauce as lunch, and champagne as a cure. Even though the situation is fascinating and mysterious, including attics with torture machinery, there are so much flashbacks to the youth of the main character that very little seems to happens in the current timeline in the midsection of the book. Violence of male desire, art philosophy and Thio as an ailing roommate are however all interesting, as are the allusions to Mittel Europa, and especially the dying Austrian Hungarian dynasty, nature versus rationality and the overtunes of antisemitism and polarisation. Olga Tokarczuk brings a lot, which unfortunately makes the central part quite plodding.

Overcoming the binary, the need of society to burst into animalistic, hermetic bursts of violence, with the setting in 1913 being especially ominous from this angle. Since every November at fool moon some of the villagers and spa goers, as new tourists in the region, end up being found ripped up.
It’s believed that there are spirits in the forest that claim a villager every year as a sacrifice, Abraham like. And then there are man-made, vegetation dolls with a hole where vagina's should be, as a commentary on how men use both women and nature just to satisfy themselves.
A big novel with so many ideas it is almost overwhelming, very thought provoking yet not a 100% successful, despite being fascinating, in my opinion.

Quotes:
People should get used to the fact that they are being watched.

Nature itself cures us

As we know however the most interesting things however are always in the shadows, in the invisible

Well the misogyny is upped a few levels here compared to Hans Castorp his reflections on Claudia

No one beliefs in their own death

Behind the truth hides violence

Being dead is a disgrace

Death was decidedly cosmopolitan

Whether we like it or not, motherhood is the only reason for the existence of this troublesome sex

One could tell he was fond of his own voice

Weakness was cured by champagne

It was simple: to be a man is learning to ignore anything that cases trouble

Threefold stereotypes of woman as girl, wife and crone

Because a woman’s body belongs not only to her, but to mankind.

Since she gives birth, she is public property

Being both a subject and an object

Oh well, it is pity she died, but that isn’t to say she is blameless

Men’s desire needed to be satisfied immediately, or the world would descend into chaos

Is he a girl that he doesn’t want to undress and his nipples are sensitive?

With results like this you have been dead for three days, dear sir

A person, meaning a man

Only very small and very big things are immortal

My lungs are real, my nationality is not

Why would anyone want to kill us?
It is enough that we were born.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here we are, slightly changed, but just the same as before, warm but also cold, both seeing and blind. Here we are, here are our hands formed from decaying branches, our bellies, our nipples that are puffballs, our womb that blends into a fox's den, into the depths of the earth, and is now nursing a fox's litter. Can you see us at last, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, you brave engineer from the flat woodless steppes?

In a textual conversation between one Nobel winner and another, Tokarczuk re-opens Mann's The Magic Mountain but in her own inimitable way. This feels more like Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead than The Books of Jacob: it's easy to read, is quite the page-turner, in fact, though - of course - there are depths here too. OT's humour is on full display as is her sardonic wit and intelligence and, make no mistake, there's a whole raft of quotations, allusions and intertexts that make up the narrative. With an author's note that stretches from Ovid to Shakespeare, Augustine to Milton, Darwin to Kerouac, this places itself firmly in dialogue with a whole stretch of what we might loosely call western thought, just as Mann offered up a compressed survey of European philosophy.

What is at stake here, though, is a question of gender and the extent to which misogyny is deeply (deeply) engrained within western intellectual traditions and culture. OT deals with this with a sense of biting sarcasm: ' "Woman represents a bygone, inferior stage of evolution, so writes Darwin... Woman is like..." - here he sought the right word - "an evolutionary laggard" '; and the 'puppen', kinds of organic sex dolls (though keep your eye on them...).

The book also revitalises the bildungsroman tradition partly by exploring the way Wojnicz's upbringing by his father inculcates a sense of conservative masculinity but also by offering up quite a different sense of growth: 'he felt plural, multiple, multifaceted, compound and complicated like a coral reef, like a mushroom spawn whose actual existence is located underground'.

I'm assuming the title is a compound term indicating a merger between 'empusa', the female witch-like spirits mentioned in Aristophanes' The Frogs, and Plato's (all male) Symposium - a spot-on mash-up that brings together the philosophical and the comical in all these texts.

It's worth adding that you should keep an eye out for the switch to a 'we' first-person plural voice - I was reading an ARC which doesn't always allow a space before the transition, though it's easy enough to note it - I won't say anything about what this means in terms of plot but certainly perspective is one of the themes of the narrative.

So, my verdict is that this may well be a popular OT sitting alongside Drive Your Plow - it wears its learning and politics lightly (even, we might say, a little heavy handedly) but it's a nimble, knowing way of saying something serious in a witty and sardonic voice.

Many thanks Fitzcarraldo for an ARC via NetGalley

[Berengaria · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

short review for busy readers:
Heavy-description, minimal-plot exploration of the elements of folk horror. Psychological horror fans won't find it frightening at all (mild). Much philosophising on political, social and theological topics that affected society right before WW1 as a mirror to today's problems. Watch out for the popular mushroom trope!

in detail:
The amount of thought and crafting that went into this novel is astounding. The themes were clearly carefully chosen, and even if the narrative flits from one topic to the next quite quickly, some of the main ideas circle back around.

That makes this novel an excellent choice for any book club or discussion group that enjoys taking its time and exploring the ideas presented in books.

Those who read my reviews know I do not enjoy older styles of writing, nor am I a fan of long nature descriptions nor itemising everything in a room. Mushrooms also not a fave.

All of that is present here, which means that while I am in awe of the craft and talent that went into this novel, and very much enjoyed the character conversations and topics...I can't say I enjoyed the novel or even liked it. The writing style, the way the topics were bundled, the endless hammering on anti-feminist notions and low-action plot grated on me too much.

But that's a me thing and other readers will certainly not be as finicky on those points.

All-in-all, I'm very glad I read it and want to thank Barbara K for the great buddy read. You can read her much more enthusiastic 5-star review here

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finalist for the 2025 PEN Translation Prize

And so it went–first a declamation by August, then another tirade about the collapse of civilization from Lukas, followed by some incomprehensible allusions made by Frommer, until the disputants’ tongues were slowed by the effect of Schwärmerei and once again they were all overcome by a sort of thickening feeling, which made it hard to move because of weakness or disinclination. As if the world were built of plywood and were now delaminating before their eyes, as if all contours were blurring, revealing fluid passages between things. The same process affected their ideas, and so the discussion became less and less factual, because the speakers had suddenly lost their sense of certainty, and every word that had been reliable so far now acquired contexts, entailed allusions, or flickered with remote associations. Finally they sank into dreadful fatigue, and one after another floated off to their rooms, breathing heavily on the stairs.

Subtitled 'A Health Resort Horror Story', The Empusium is Antonia Lloyd-Jones' translation of Olga Tokarczuk's 2022 novel Empuzjon.

The book is an alternative take on Mann's Der Zauberberg, set in 1913 the Silesian health spa resort of Görbersdorf (now Sokołowsko) from which the clinic in Davos took its inspiration. At initial face value, this reads as a work of the same period as Mann's novel, and read simply as historical fiction, Tokarczuk's recreation of the town is impressive, rendered in vivid prose:

By a twist of circumstance, as Frau Opitz’s body was descending on ropes into the open grave, the exact autumn equinox took place, and the ecliptic was aligned in such a special way that it counterbalanced the vibration of the Earth. Naturally, nobody noticed this–people have more important things on their minds. But we know it.

In the highland valley that spread above the underground lake stillness sets in, and although it is never windy here, now there is no sense of the faintest puff, as though the world were holding its breath. Late insects are perching on stems, a starling turns to stone, staring at a long-gone movement among the clumps of parsley in the garden. A spiderweb stretched between the blackberry bushes stops quivering and goes taut, straining to hear the waves coming from the cosmos, and water makes itself at home in the moss thallus, as if it were to stay there forever, as if it were to forget about its most integral feature–that it flows. For the earthworm, the world’s tension is a sign to seek shelter for the winter. Now it is planning to push down into the ground, perhaps hoping to find the deeply hidden ruins of paradise. The cows that chew the yellowing grass also come to a standstill, putting their internal factories of life on hold. A squirrel looks at the miracle of a nut and knows that it is pure, condensed time, that it is also its future, dressed in this strange form. And in this brief moment everything defines itself anew, marking out its limits and aims afresh; just for a short while, blurred shapes cluster together again.

It is a very brief moment of equilibrium between light and darkness, almost imperceptible, a single instant in which the whole pattern is filled, the promise of great order is fulfilled, but only in the blink of an eye. In this scrap of time everything returns to a state of perfection that existed before the sky was separated from the earth. But at once this perfect balance dissolves like a shape on water, the image dims and dusk starts to drift towards night, then night gains the upper hand–now it will be avenged for its six-month period of humiliation, establishing new bridgeheads every evening.

But the political and philosophical debates, unlike Mann's, rather peter out as the patients are too fond of the local liquor, Schwärmerei: Its strange flavour and smell made Wojnicz think of the word ‘underground’. It tasted of roots and moss, mushroom spawn and liquorice all at once. It must have contained aniseed and wormwood. The first impression on the tongue was not good–it seemed to smell bad, but only for a split second. Then warmth flooded the mouth, and the sensation of an incredible wealth of flavours–like forest berries and something entirely exotic.

and also descend rapidly into one topic - Wojnicz had noticed that every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women - and to straight out misogyny:

'À propos, sometimes when we address a woman,’ continued the buttoned-up Walter Frommer, ‘we might gain the impression that she replies sensibly and thinks as we do. But that is an illusion. They imitate’–he placed special emphasis on the word imitate–‘our way of communicating, and one cannot deny that some of them are very good at it.’

Cleverly, Tokarczuk has taken all the views expressed from a range of 36 canonical male writers and thinkers, including Augustine of Hippo, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Conrad, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Jack Kerouac, D.H. Lawrence, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ovid and Plato, Jean-Paul Sartre, Shakespeare, August Strindberg and Thomas Aquinas.

The novel takes its title from Aristophanes play Βάτραχοι (The Frogs), which one character tells claims is the earliest known mention of witches in literature:

XANTHIAS Aargh, I can see a gigantic monster!
DIONYSUS What’s it like?
XANTHIAS Terrifying. And it keeps changing: it’s a bull, no, it’s a mule, and now it’s a woman. And what a beauty!
DIONYSUS Where is she? Let me at her!
XANTHIAS The woman’s gone, she’s changed into a dog.
DIONYSUS So it’s Empusa!
XANTHIAS Her whole face is one great ball of fire!
DIONYSUS Does she have a leg of bronze?
XANTHIAS By Poseidon, the other one’s made of cow dung, I’m sure of it!
DIONYSUS Where can I run to?
XANTHIAS And where can I?

And as the novel progresses the Horror Story element comes to the fore, with the mysterious Tutschi, figures in the form of a woman created out of the natural products of the forest which the local charcoal burners used for sexual relief, but which seem to, once a year, have a life of their own (leading to an oddly high number of graves in the local cemetary with men who die in November). And the Hans-Castorp-like central character, Mieczysław Wojnicz, in his early 20s, harbours a hidden secret of his own.

An impressive read - not as innovative or erudite as Flights (tr. Jennifer Croft), which remains my favourite of Tokarczuk's works, but one which combines the atmosphere and mythology of Primeval and Other Times and the mystery element of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (both tr. Lloyd-Jones) with a clear, if unsubtle, political message [and at a more sensible length than The Books of Jacob (tr. Croft)].

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Torkarczuks erstes Buch nach dem Nobelpreis. Hält es den Erwartungen stand? Ich weiß es nicht. Ich weiß nur, dass ich dieses Buch mit großem Vergnügen gelesen habe. Es unterhält nicht, aber es beschäftigt. Aufgrund des Settings – eine Männerpension im Luftkurort Görbersdorf (heute Sokołowsko) in Schlesien – ziehen viele Rezensenten den Vergleich zu Thomas Manns Zauberberg. Unpassender Weise, denn Empuzjon reißt viele Themen nur an, stellt Ansichten häufig nur plakativ dar ohne tiefere Betrachtung des Gesagten. Dies ist, wie wir im Nachwort der Autorin erfahren, Absicht, legt sie doch die frauenfeindlichen und misogynen Zitate berühmter Köpfe ihren Akteuren in den Mund. Im Gegensatz zum Zauberberg beinhaltet Empuzjon einen mystisch-sagenhaften Unterton, der mit einer Kriminalfall verwoben in einer fast faustischen (Walpurgisnacht) Szene kulminiert. Von der Landschaft, den eigenartigen Gebräuchen und Speisen der Einheimischen geht etwas Bedrohliches aus, wie von dem im Roman erwähnten Gemälde "Landschaft mit Opferung Isaaks" von Henri met de Bles.



Und dann ist da doch eine Parallele zum Zauberberg. Auch Empuzjon ist im Grund genommen ein Roman über das Ankommen in der Erwachsenenwelt, um die Selbstfindung des 23jährigen angehenden Ingenieurs für Abwasserwirtschaft aus Lwów (heute Lviv) Mieszysław Wojnicz. Nur geht es anders als bei Mann nicht um Fragen der Weltanschauung, sondern um das soziale Geschlecht, sprich „gender“.

Ich habe den Roman im Original gelesen. Die Sprache ist klar, treffend und war für mich gut verständlich. Die Meisterschaft Tokarczuks zeigt sich nicht in der Wortwahl, sondern der Atmosphäre, die sie erschafft und wie sie uns ein grundlegendes Problem menschlicher Existenz mit dieser Geschichte nahebringt. Für mich ein Buch, das einer Nobelpreisträgerin würdig ist.

[Caro the Helmet Lady · Rating 4 out of 5]

According to wikipedia "Empusa or Empousa (/ɛmˈpjuːsə/) is a shape-shifting female being in Greek mythology, said to possess a single leg of copper, commanded by Hecate, whose precise nature is obscure. In Late Antiquity, the empousai have been described as a category of phantoms or spectres, equated with the lamiai and mormolykeia, thought to seduce and feed on young men.
That's just FYI.
Let's pull out some random key words - such as shape-shifting, female, obscure, young men, men, nature. It all will fit within a story but not the way you'd expect. Although I surely don't know what you expect. But just believe me or come back for a refund later. But I won't be here waiting for you, just so you know. So you better don't come back and just trust me.

So, let me point out right from the start that you won't find in this story tons of bloodthirsty female vampires running around the mountain villages naked and just doing their job - seducing and feeding on. That would be so not Tokarczuk, as you can probably imagine.

Instead you'll get some enigmatic characters, some of some yuckiest regional food (by the scale of its grossness I'm not even sure if it wasn't made up by the Author, but surely she's seen a lot in her globetrotting so I'll just give her a credit), some infuriating misogynistic "insights" nobody asked for but having their purpose and important place in the story. Also you'll get some thick atmosphere of mystery and innuendo only getting thicker.

Also, also - you will get the story itself, one painted with words, very visual, depicted in a great detail. As you probably know already, Tokarczuk is extremely talented when it comes to wordy words and languagy language.

Alas, what I couldn't find in the story was the promised horror. Maybe it just didn't work for me, but something just didn't exactly click. If everything else was a hit in this book, horror was a miss...
Maybe the worst horror in this story was when they ate those regional, um, well, delicatessen and after that nothing was scary enough anymore...

Otherwise it was a delightful book, a page-turner definitely, a very nice attempt on... Silesian gothic??

[Katia N · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a hundred years since Thomas Mann has written The Magic Mountain (TMM). I’ve read TMM twice. The first time i’ve struggled and the second time I’ve absolutely admired that novel. So i thought it would be a good way to celebrate by reading the newly translated novel by Olga Tokarczuk that was clearly inspired by Mann.

I have to admit that in retrospect i’d prefer i knew nothing about TMM before reading this book as inevitably i could not help but compare this novel to TMM and struggled to appreciate it on its own terms. Olga did not help as for the first half at least she stuck to her version of Mann’s style with detailed descriptions of the surroundings including the meals and physical countenances of her characters. The majority of them could as well be traced to Mann’s characters. She subverted the style and plot of course. But for me she did not do it boldly enough until the later part of her novel.

Also what makes Mann’s work so rich is an exchange of ideas between the characters. All of them are profound, complex and rendered in such a way that the reader would never know Mann’s personal stand on those issues. Olga’s novel is much simpler on that level. Her characters talk about many things as well. But their views are quite shallow, deliberately cartoonish:

“Wojnicz (the main character standing for Hans Castrop in TMM) had noticed that every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women.”

And it seems that for her as well a historical perspective on misogyny is the main area of investigation in this novel. In this she is richly intertextual including the ancient Greeks, witch hunts and of course Mann’s contemporaries. However, i was not sure what was new about it. It is quite likely unfortunately that still there are some men in our times holding such views. It might even have been that they still hold the power in the society. But the criticism of that expressed in such a form does not come across as particularly effective. I do not think they would be shocked out of their convictions by reading that their views were wildly shared between the educated elite of the earlier 20th century. The rest of us are informed and do not need to be convinced.

As a result, the first part of the novel is a bit Disneyland Venice compared to the real Venice - lacking authenticity. Even the death which is grimly present in Mann’s novel is more like a decoration here, the way to approach the uncanny.

But the good news for me was that it seemed she started to write one book but finished writing another. And they transformed into each other relatively seamlessly. The latter part is characteristically Olga’s with her original taste for the uncanny, supernatural and its potential role in human perception. Also the feministic pathos of revenge is played quite nicely.

On its own terms the book was an easy and quick read and quite entertaining. That is as soon as I’ve managed to get out of Mann’s shadow. She writes effortlessly and manages to use interesting narrative voice - it is plural first person, but this she does manage to subvert from Mann’s similar tool rather impressively.

Mann was writing his novel with overshadowing of the WW1. I was thinking how did Olga use a century of hindsight for her benefit. There is misogyny theme of course. But also she clarified the idea of perspective, the absence of the binaries in the world, in human nature and even in human body. She did it in quite a categorical way through a monologue of the Doctor: “If anyone thinks the world is set of stark opposites, he is sick.” The Doctor also explained to Wojnicz how the real world appeared to be: “blurred, out of focus, flickering… depending on one’s point of view." He might have been enlightened about the very recent contemporary findings of the quantum physics. But more likely he projected Olga’s more modern knowledge popularised in many books such as The Order of Time.

Read this book for its plot, sense of humour, sense of place and vivid descriptions. Avoid reading Mann before it if you can. As far as the ideas are concerned, I’ve managed to find a paragraph which resonated and felt fresh:

“Our entire culture has grown out of a feeling of inferiority, out of all those unfulfilled ambitions. And yet it is the other way around: that which is weak in us gives us strength. This constant effort to compensate for weakness governs our entire lives. Demosthenes had a stammer, and that was exactly why he became the greatest speaker of all time. Not in spite of it, but because of it.”

[Cláudia Azevedo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Empúsio" é mais uma obra desconcertante de Olga Tokarczuk, escritora polaca que recebeu o Prémio Nobel da Literatura em 2019 e que tanto admiro.
O título do livro convoca Empusa, uma entidade mitológica grega que representa um espectro feminino de Hécate, deusa dos caminhos. Esta figura espectral seduziria os homens para se alimentar com o seu sangue.
A origem do título é importante para enquadrar o enredo e a misoginia reinante, bem como todas as citações de filósofos, teólogos e escritores que, ao longo de séculos, reduziram as mulheres a seres perigosos e imprevisíveis, física e mentalmente inferiores aos homens. O mesmo fizeram os ditados populares, como o que este: "O Diabo, a mulher e o sapo são farinha do mesmo saco."
Mieczysław Wojnicz, católico, nascido em Lviv, em 1889, olhos azuis, cabelo louro, futuro engenheiro, é um dos doentes de tuberculose numa hospedaria para cavalheiros situada em Görbersdorf, onde se situa o sanatório (realmente existiu e podemos encontrar várias imagens numa simples pesquisa no Google).
Durante a sua estadia, participa em reuniões nas quais se discute precisamente o papel das mulheres na sociedade, mas também política e religião.
"— Quer gostemos quer não, a maternidade é a única justificação para a existência de um género tão problemático — resumiu Opitz."
Ou
"a psique das mulheres é mais fraca e (...) a camada que nela cobre o que é instintivo e animalesco é mais fina. A doença mental, ao perfurar essa cobertura, faz com que todos os instintos primitivos se evadam para o exterior e dominem a já frágil e delicada psique da mulher."
Ao preconceito atávico contra as mulheres em geral alia-se a crença de que, uma vez por ano, um homem era sacrificado por espíritos de bruxas que se perpetuam nas montanhas, à procura de alimento (sangue, sim, a lembrar vampiros) e vingança.
"— Eu bem disse: estão aqui os vossos demónios, todas essas Tuntschi locais, essas empusas."
Outro tema deste livro é a descoberta e aceitação do eu, apesar ou contra as normas vigentes. É sobre ser "normal" ou "anormal" (interiormente saber-se diferente da norma exigida pelo exterior).
"Cada um de nós é um potencial louco, meu jovem. A norma é uma fantasia. Todos nós nos encontramos numa fronteira com um pé no nosso próprio mundo interior e o outro no mundo exterior, oscilando perigosamente. É uma posição desconfortável e poucos conseguem manter o equilíbrio."
A história de Wojnicz é maravilhosa pelo que traz sobre amor e descoberta, crescimento e reinvenção do ser humano, numa época obscura - não o serão quase todas? Ele é a outra face da moeda, o indivíduo que se questiona, que se ilumina enquanto e porque atravessa a escuridão, aquele que não só sobrevive como sai mais forte das provações, a metamorfose que não busca a perfeição, mas a verdade e o sentido.
"(...) é em nós que reside o sentimento de desvalorização, a convicção de que a nós nos falta algo que todos os outros têm. Ao longo das nossas vidas, temos de lidar com este sentimento de inferioridade, superá-lo ou atrelá-lo à carruagem das nossas ambições e da busca destrutiva da perfeição. E o que é a perfeição? Alguém sabe?"
Aconselho que cada página seja lida com atenção porque mesmo o aparentemente acessório tem uma importância de que o leitor só se apercebe depois.
Para ler e repetir abundantemente.

[inciminci · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is the year 1913 and Polish engineering student and tuberculosis patient Mieczysław arrives at the health resort Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen. While the inhabitants of the guest house pass their time with long and boring and manly conversations on politics, war and women and enjoy the house drink "Schwärmerei", disturbing things start happening; a woman has killed herself, but was she ever real? A visit to the local graveyard reveals that every November a male patient has been dying - and it's October already! Slowly slowly an oppressive, almost nightmarish atmosphere spreads amongst the patients who both try to make sense of it as well as suppress their sexual needs in various ways.

Mieczysław needs to deal with more than one mystery, first and foremost his own.

If you know Tokarczuk's writing, you pretty much know what expects you in terms of style and writing - subtle humor, the horror of real life, local characters and folkloric elements, the focal point in her latest shifts to a feminist message she expertly conveys in this historical setting.

Tokarczuk really knows how to gradually build up her readers' resentment, astonishment, and even anger against these gentlemen on their high horses judging over the world, so much that it can become too much at times, but she does this long enough to give relieve with a wonderful twist towards the end of the story. If you don't know what "Empusium" is, don't worry, it is a term the author coined herself and it will make sense in the end.

It is probably useful to mention that this is a work, not based on, not imitating, but directly alluding to Thomas Mann's Zauberberg in that setting and main character are very similar, basically the same, but the story goes another path.

[Barbara K · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is this thing with Tokarczyk’s books where you are always aware that they are skillfully written and packed with ideas, but (for me at least) even though you are aware of those things, they don’t get in the way of the story. This is in contrast to authors whose prose may be elegant, but whose books put me to sleep. (John Updike, I’m thinking of you here.)

A young man, Mieczysław, travels to a remote village on the German/Polish border to receive treatments at a tuberculosis sanatarium. Since there are no rooms available at the main treatment facility, he lodges at a men’s guest house where other patients in similar circumstances reside.

The year is 1913. Europe is on the cusp of World War I, and is teeming with novel ideas ranging from Freud to Marx to theosophy, with plenty of stops in between. During the day Mieczysław takes walks and receives treatments at the sanatarium. At night he listens with great interest to the discussions of these controversial topics among his fellow residents while they drink Schwärmerei, a local liqueur that appears to have hallucinogenic qualities. Despite their acute differences in matters of politics and philosophy, the residents always agree on one thing: the inferior status and malignant nature of women.

But then strange things begin to happen, the first of which is that the wife of the proprietor of the guest house hangs herself. Although that appears to be the cause of her demise, no one, including her husband, seems very distressed by her passing (except for missing her cooking skills); the husband has been known to abuse her and there is a possibility that he may have had a part in her death.

The residents are taken by this man and his assistant on walks in the nearby forest, where odd things are seen - or only perceived. Mieczysław hears stories of women accused of doing harm to villagers, who escaped into the same forest centuries before. And then there are those gravestones for young men with dates of death always in November.

Tokarczyk feeds this growing sense of unease with a distinctive use of points of view. We seem to be hearing the tale in the third person, and then suddenly she slips in comments from the first person plural. “We” see things from a sly perspective, often from on low, under a table, for instance. “We” seem to be spying on what’s happening. At the beginning of the next scene, the story seems to be back in the third person.

Against this backdrop Mieczysław struggles to understand and come to terms with his personal demons. As the calendar approaches November, the tension builds.

To say more would mean spoilers, so I will limit myself to the comment that a great deal is explained and resolved in the ending.

My appreciation for this book, which would have been high enough had I read it alone, was heightened by buddy-reading with Berengaria. Here’s a link to her review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Matthew Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

80th book of 2024.

I finished this last week but around moving into a new flat and not having any Wi-Fi, I haven't had chance to sit down and write it. I read it in the south of France, in the Pyrenees mountains, so I was in the perfect place for another mountainous book of 'restoration'. The book I read before this one was Mann's The Magic Mountain, which this book is riffing off. The basic premise is the same, but where Hans Castorp was a young engineer going into the Swiss mountains to visit his cousin, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz (Voy-nitch), a hydraulic engineering student from Lwów, is heading up into the Silesian mountains for tuberculosis treatment. As the second title suggests, Tokarczuk is turning Mann on its head: this is a 'horror' story. It's not an overt horror, and if you've read Mann's novel, then you'll find much of this in the same vein. Long days of routine or else no routine and discussions on various subjects. Of course, being the size it is, Tokarczuk does not write discussions as long as Mann did. A lot of them centre around women and their roles in the world.

I won't spoil all the extra layers that Tokarczuk adds, or even tiptoe into the concept of the 'horror' story within the pages, but I will say she plays with gender, sexuality and the self, among other things. If you know anything about Mann's biography then these things align somewhat. There is even a flashback scene, in Wojnicz's school, concerning another male pupil and his pencil. Again, those who have read Mann, will know what this means. If you haven't read Mann, the book would still be enjoyable, I'm sure, but the references and nods to the former text would be lost on you. They are as small as the word 'horizontal' being used once or twice. Tokarczuk is great. I cannot wait to see what is next from her; she is a consistently good and interesting writer. Deserving of the Nobel, I think.

[verbava · Rating 5 out of 5]

новий роман ольги токарчук, надивовижу красивий і трошки магічний, натиснув у мені всі правильні кнопочки. дія відбувається на самому початку хх століття (чи то пак наприкінці довгого хіх) в санаторії для сухотників, і, як і належить мешканцям роману про сухотників, персонажі токарчук оздоровлюються зі змінними успіхами, споглядають пейзажі, дивуються з місцевих звичаїв і говорять, говорять, говорять.

головний герой, крізь якого нам показують світ, — мечислав войнич, поляк зі львова, який не дуже комфортно почувається у своїй національній ідентичності (і не тільки в ній), та національна ідентичність — і не основне, про що точаться розмови, бо рано чи пізно кожна тема скочується в обговорення жінок та їхніх численних неспроможностей. власне, ольга токарчук не приховує, що тут б’ється серце роману, і наприкінці тексту подає умовний список використаної літератури, де вказано, що усі висловлювання про жінок походять із реальних текстів: від августина з тертуліаном до керуака з берроузом. прийом виходить трохи маніпулятивний (ми-бо не знаємо пропорцій і не маємо конкретних атрибуцій), але загалом непогано оголює вічнозеленість мізогінних дискурсів.

і щодо цих дискурсів, уміщених на перехресті ранніх 1910-х, коли відбувається дія роману (і до яких берроуз із керуаком усе-таки і хронологічно, й ідеологічно ближчі), і ранніх 2020-х, коли роман написано, можуть виникнути запитання.

перше — щодо того, що сучасна мізогінія звучить не так. його класно контекстуалізує ярослава стріха, яка дивиться на «емпузйон» із трошки іншого культурного ракурсу, і загалом я мушу погодитися, але з одним уточненням: сучасна мізогінія звучить не тільки так. на жаль, вона досі й отак теж звучить. і це я навіть не ходжу в коментарі до фейсбучних дописів про стамбульську конвенцію, бо нерви дорогі мені як пам’ять; достатньо ненадовго зависнути в коментарях до класного книжкового каналу в телеграмі, де начебто збираються люди, які багато читають і щось від цього отримують, — і там буде чи пан, який щиро визнає, що жінок не читає, бо дитячі книжки в них іще виходять, а от усе інше — ой-вей, чи інший пан, який фурією прилітає у відгук на мемуари першої дружини гемінґвея, щоб розповісти, що букблогерство вбиває літературну критику, бо спирається на почуття, а не раціональність, тому просуває не справжню літературу, а всілякі п’ятдесятвідтінків (і якщо вам здається, що це не гендерно забарвлена реакція, потім цей самий дописувач нагадує, що мемуари взагалі-то написала жінка, яка без гемінґвея була б нікому не відомою, нікому не цікавою й не писала б узагалі). і, читаючи цей чатик, я почуваюся майже мечиславом войничем, який сидить, слухає, оху дивується, але в розмову не встрягає, бо спитати першого пана про те, чи визнав би він із такою самою гордістю, що не читає небілих авторів, або другого пана — про те, чому йому такі важливі ієрархії, було б цікаво, але безрезультатно (і не факт, що ці запитання не потонули б серед інших коментарів, точнісінько як у вечірніх розмовах в «емпузйоні»).

друге запитання озвучує єжи сосновський, який починає з того, що він, узагалі-то, фемініст, але ольга токарчук недостатньо голосно каже, що #notallmen, а це в наші часи, коли патріархат нарешті гине, страшний сексизм. мовляв, невже авторці складно було вивести хоч одного чоловіка, який відстоював би права жінок? у відповідь на це я тихо розводжу руками, бо такий персонаж насправді є: вальтер фроммер ставить незручні запитання й висловлює контроверсійні позиції, а що його голос звучить тихо — ну, це не дивно в гомосоціальній компанії, де ієрархії вже встановлені й альфасамці б’ють себе в груди й розпушують пір’я. але цікаво думати, що чиєсь остаточне враження від тексту зводиться до того, що ольга токарчук недостатньо наголошує на чоловічих честі, гідності й порядності.

останніми місяцями мені приносять велику втіху revenge fantasies, і, мабуть, багато мого захвату від цього роману — наслідок того, що я в ньому прочитала розкішну, солодку revenge fantasy, у якій сам світ із лагідною усмішкою розбиває обличчя персонажам. виявляється, що пишатися своїм (не ексклюзивним) раціо і справді мати здатність його застосовувати — трохи різні речі. війна не почнеться, кажуть вони, чоловіча раціональність не дасть війні початися — але до 1914 року лишається так мало, що навіть не смішно. жінки — ірраціональні й неспроможні, кажуть вони, чистісінька пасивна природа, над якою стоїть чоловічий розум, — але природа пережовує їх і випльовує. вони перебувають на вершині харчового ланцюжка й готові що завгодно собі й іншим розповісти, аби тільки підтримати цю ієрархію, — але реальність зрештою віддає перевагу іншим структурам та іншим історіям. так, о так.

[Ken]

Some books (even well-written) you know 50 pages in are just not for you, and so you set them aside. Some books (especially well-written) you recognize as relatives of old friends from your reading past -- you embrace them, cherish your time with them, ask that they not leave you. And then there are books like this one. Slow-ish but well-written. No way are you going to abandon them, but part of you, even while recognizing the high caliber of the writing, is illogically impatient for the tempo to pick up.

It may be, too, that subject matter made things a bit of a drag. Our young Polish patient, at this health resort for a cure (tuberculosis, or Keats' disease) is surrounded by a crowd of man-splaining men that no man could tolerate. The misogynistic conversations are THAT suffocating. As a reader, you need air. Neatly, though, Tokarczuk provides an Afterword about these men at the end. Oh. I knew they were familiar!

Anyhoo, a tip of the hat to Mann's Magic Mountain,, which has magically eluded me to this moment in time. And an ending that, well, really tests your patience with these patients. But all in the name of art, and I see what Tokarczuk is about, and it's borderline brilliant. But I'm glad it's over.

[Natalie Duke · Rating 2 out of 5]

One star for the author’s obvious writing skills. One star for the idea: using the real, misogynistic words of famous male thinkers to make a feminist point.
That’s it.
I hated this book. I don’t know why it’s dubbed a horror story because it’s not. Nothing happens. If I wanted to listen to a bunch of arrogant dudes sit around talking about how worthless they think women are, I’ll go to a men’s rights conference. There are no female characters. I guess the “we” spirits in the woods are women but they still aren’t part of the story very much. I was bored reading this and only finished so I could talk about how much I hated it in book club.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een feministisch antwoord op Thomas Manns 'Zauberberg', zo ruist het door het struikgewas van de recensies over 'Empusion'. En dat is absoluut terecht, want als (mannelijke) lezer voel je regelmatig het schaamrood op de wangen gloeien, wanneer je de denigrerende, botte en domme uitspraken over vrouwen leest, afkomstig van gerenommeerde (mannelijke) filosofen, auteurs, psychologen, kunstenaars en wetenschappers, zoals Olga Tokarczuk ze meesterlijk puzzelend in de mond legt van haar (mannelijke) personages.

Het zou echter wel heel kort door de bocht zijn om deze schitterend gecomponeerde roman tot louter dat feministische thema te beperken. Zoals bij alle grote literatuur krijgen we hier een meerlagig en meerduidig landschap voorgeschoteld waarin, aangekondigd door een citaat van Pessoa (Het onbekende loert naar ons vanuit de schaduw.), een terugkeer naar de natuur als natuurgeneeskundige griezelverhaal wordt beschreven. Ook al speelt deze roman zich af in quasi dezelfde tijd als Manns Toverberg, dus begin vorig eeuw, onze hedendaagse vervreemding van de natuur en de latente angst die daarmee samenhangt, woekert zich als een vorm van suspense doorheen deze bladzijden.

En dan is er nog Mieczysław Wojnicz, Olga Takorczuks tegenhanger van Thomas Manns Hans Castorp. Met eenzelfde onschuld betreedt hij het strijdtoneel en wordt hij de speelbal van de andere mannelijke gasten in het 'Gästehaus für Herren' (dus niet in het hoofdsanatorium) van het kuurdorpje Görbersdorf'. Zich tegoed doend aan copieuze, nauwgezet beschreven en door de artsen voorgeschreven maaltijden (veel vlees en aardappelnoedels) en erop los filosoferend tot de lokale paddenstoelenlikeur Schwärmerei hen verdooft en doet stilvallen, proberen ze de dag door te komen en hun zieke lichaam te negeren.

Via Thilo, de jongste en ziekste van het gezelschap, ontdekken we de ontluikende homoseksualiteit van Mieczysław Wojnicz, terwijl er om hen heen allerlei vreemde dingen gebeuren, mysterieus voortspruitend uit iets als een ongrijpbare, oeroude natuurwet. De stem van de alwetende vertelster, die het over zichzelf in het meervoud heeft, als een 'wij' dat alles altijd gadeslaat, speelt hierin een cruciale rol en is alweer een literair element dat van deze roman een topleeservaring maakt. En dan is er nog de plot. De Poolse Nobelprijswinnares laat haar lezers lang sudderen op dat vlak, maar de afloop is behalve verrassend ook heel erg helend en bevredigend.

Ik weet dan ook niet goed waarom ik toch geen 5 sterren wil geven. Misschien omdat 'De Toverberg' nu eenmaal één van mijn absolute lievelingsboeken is en me nog net iets meer leesplezier bezorgde. Tegelijk vind ik Olga Tokarczuks compositie ook echt meesterlijk, zowel qua taal, vorm als inhoud. 4,5* dus, met kans op 5 als ik deze roman ooit nog eens herlees, net zoals ik dat met 'De Toverberg' al deed. En misschien moet het gewoon een traditie worden: elke honderd jaar een nieuwe versie van deze klassieker, geschreven door een gerijpte auteur die de thema's van zijn, haar of diens tijd meedogenloos knap weet te belichten.

[Semjon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Äußerst ideenreicher und unterhaltsamer Roman über die Gesellschaft kurz vor dem 1. Weltkrieg. Zunächst war ich skeptisch wegen der offensichtlichen Ähnlichkeit zum Zauberberg. Sollte das eine Hommage an den Klassiker, eine Kritik an Thomas Mann oder nur intellektuelles Schaulaufen darstellen? Egal, es spielte für mich für die Beurteilung keine Rolle. Vielmehr hat mich der junge, scheue Protagonist Mieczysław Wojnicz fasziniert, wie er so hilflos zwischen arroganten Ärzten und selbstverliebten Mitpatienten hin und her geworfen wird. Auch gefiel mir die Idee, aus dem niederschlesischen Kurort langsam einen Ort des Grauens, der Geheimnisse und der Geister zu entwickeln. Nervig fand ich in ihrer Masse lediglich die permanente Frauenfeindlichkeit, die den Männern da in Form von Zitaten aus der Geschichte männlicher Denker in den Mund gelegt wurden. Da waren auch Persönlichkeiten aus der zweiten und dritten Reihe dabei, deren Stumpfsinn besser in die Analen als in die aktuelle Belletristik gehören. Manchmal trug die Autorin für meinen Geschmack zu dick auf, aber insgesamt habe ich es mit Freude und Interesse gelesen.

[Gosia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arcydzieło? Zapewne, tak. Tokarczuk pisze tak prosto a zarazem tak pięknie, że aż kapcie spadają.
Ale, to nie znaczy że może nie wszystkie elementy do mnie przemówiły, i osobiście daję 4, ale na pewno robi wrażenie i po kilku ostatnich stronach po zamknięciu książki trzeba było posiedzieć i przełknąć co się przeczytało.