Eric Maas’s Reviews > The Empusium > Status Update

…it was hard to rid oneself of the impression that Lukas despised others. This contempt was like s skeleton; without it he might have collapsed and dissolved like a melting snowman. But inspire of that, Wojnicz thought he seemed weak, as if made of flimsy material that looked good from the outside but would not last.

Attaboy Wojnicz!

5. Holes in the ground
…it feels as if they are standing on a stage, as if this is the overture to an opera, and the spectators in this theater are the trees, blueberry bushes, moss-coated stones and some fluid, ill-defined presence that is moving like streams of warmer air among the mighty trunks, boughs and branches.

lucius’s adventures were like dreadful torment because the threat of never managing to return to his own shape was always hanging over him, the threat that he would die as a donkey, and that his real nature, his internal existence, would never be recognized!

The outer and inner existence, with one of them being interchangeable deserves full attention here…

Empusa has already been named a few pages before (p87), and now the issue of shapeshifting passes by in a casual memory of Mieczys’s. Also, he blends Thilo with his childhood friend Tolek, in a non-erotic parallel with Pribislav Hippe and Clawdia Chauchat.

Woman is like […] an evolutionary laggard. While Mann had gone on ahead and acquired new capabilities, woman had stayed in her old place and does not develop. That it’s why a woman it’s often socially handicapped […] and must always be reliant on a man>. (p80)

Agreed upon by sickly men who are out of place and time.

Their black fingers held sloppily rolled cigarettes in dirty pallets, and their eyes shone out of their charred faces. I

mpossible for me to assume Tokarczuk is visually quoting David Lynch ‘s woodsman in Twin Peaks (Gotta light?). Which might mean that I may have finally found a connection between Mann & Lynch, whom I both obsess about

” Landscape…is a great…mystery…because in fact…it takes shape…in the eyes…of the beholder,” he struggled to say.

[Thilo] added that it was a sort of projection of the spectator’s inner state, and that we should wonder whether what we are seeing might look entirely different in reality.

Two separate quotes on page (75) that come eerily close to two separate experiences of mine.

Sticky mud full of bark, pine cones and twigs spilled around heaps of smoldering logs, as if the skin of the forest had been ripped off, leaving the wound inflamed.

4. Chest and throat complaints

Where the Empusa is implicitely pointed out (first as a praying mantis and later in the description of the two, possibly three old crones. And return as the narrator (I assume) at the end of the chapter, seeing the grander scheme of the universe, unlike the inhabitants. Wojnicz is maybe singled out as he, in his anxieties, is closer to the truth than any of the others…

…the other was so ugly as to be fascinating. Her dripping lip made her look like an ancient sculpture depicting some sort of creature from Hades.

That’s quite specific, isn’t it. What creature could that be?