Eric Maas’s Reviews > The Empusium > Status Update

The horrible sight of the dark red, almost broken blood congealing on the stump forced him with painful ambivalence — to feel afraid, while also feeling a strange indescribable fascination close to pleasure, far mightier than picking scans off his knees, or teasing an already wobbly milk tooth. (p116)

…the bleeding, feathery shred tired to the edge of the stove filled him with despair and induced doleful, helpless weeping, which he was obliged to hide from his father, his uncle and even Józef. They would have said he was whining like a woman.

What was happening inside him seemed far more intense than the world’s most dramatic political events.

6. The patients

…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