Eric Maas’s Reviews > The Empusium > Status Update

3. Pheasant distance

all these matters absorbed his mind, drawing the world inside, into the larger, chaotic space that each of us carries within like an invisible piece of luggage that we drag after us all our lives, without knowing why. Our true self.

O, so now it’s us? The narrator(s) and the reader alike?

No one believes in their own death.

…putting themselves in order after the anarchic reign of illness.

2. Schwärmerei

Opitz’s wife has committed suicide and Wojnicz finds her body on the dinner table. Later that day, a first acquaintance with the other guests. Peculiar lot. And the narrator(s) still observe from the oddest corners. How strange it may seem, it’s their story…

1. The guesthouse for gentlemen

Fascinating from the get-go. To notice the similarities and, more emphatically, the differences with Mann’s Zauberberg is a treat. Most significant possible the difference between Mann’s benevolent and ironic tone in majestis pluralis and Tokarczuk’s ‘we’, who like aliens, eerily and distantly observe Wojnicz.

From travelers’ accounts it emerged that there were places and regions where tuberculosis did not feature: the higher mountains in all climatic zones, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and the steppes of Kirghizia.

That can’t be a coincidence and has to be a reference to Madame Chauchat und ihre Kirgisenaugen. For recovery. She might have stayed home…

Wilhelm Opitz raises his finger (Wojnicz is realizing what an essential part of Wilhelm that finger is. (p6)