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STARRED REVIEW

The Empusium

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk looses her deft, dark satirical wit on the rigid patriarchal world of pre-World War I Europe. The result is an enchanting, unsettling bildungsroman like nothing you’ve read before.

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Review of ‘The Empusium’

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s fabulous novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, opens in September 1913, when Polish 24-year-old Mieczyslaw Wojnicz arrives in the village of Görbersdorf, Germany, to be treated for tuberculosis. Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the novel draws inspiration both from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain

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