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 and from a real tuberculosis sanitarium, which, in an afterword, the author notes her effort to precisely recreate.
But this is Tokarczuk, for whom the factual and historical are just the beginning. She is known for how she mines her inspiration to achieve the mythical, and for her deft, dark satirical wit. As the subtitle, “A Health Resort Horror Story,” would lead readers to hope, the forests above the village whisper and echo with eerie sounds. The somber woods are seasonally populated by sooty charcoal burners, workers who in their off-hours fashion female effigies from moss and ferns and twigs. The narration, in the first-person plural, seems to come from ghostly entities who at times “vacate the house via the chimney or the chinks between the slate roof tiles—and then gaze from afar, from above.” There are no graveyards in Görbersdorf, where disease presides, but a cemetery in a nearby town discloses evidence of a ritual killing every November. It is September, and the clock is ticking.
While awaiting admission to the sanitarium, Mieczyslaw lodges at the Guesthouse for Gentlemen. The only other young person at the guesthouse is Thilo, an art student whose health is declining rapidly, and with whom Mieczyslaw develops an intimate friendship. The older men staying in the guesthouse come from various European cities, part of a society soon to collapse with the outbreak of World War I. After dinner, fueled by a ritual glass or two of the local psychoactive beverage, the men pontificate and mansplain, denigrating women in black-and-white terms that, Tokarczuk notes, are direct quotes from some of history’s brightest literary luminaries—Shakespeare, Yeats and many others. Mieczyslaw’s tablemates are full of certainty and unacknowledged fear.
Mieczyslaw listens, uncertain. The diagnosis that brought him to Görbersdorf came from his widowed father, who treated “the property entrusted to him in the figure of his son with great responsibility and—it was plain to see—love, albeit devoid of any sentimentality or any of the ‘female emotions’ that he so abhorred.” Mieczyslaw’s quest is to understand what, exactly, is wrong with him.
The Empusium is about a rigid patriarchal world and the tension between rationality and emotion. It is also about a young person coming of age—much like The Magic Mountain, which has been described as a bildungsroman. Facing a threat he does not understand, Mieczyslaw responds to the mysteries around him with curiosity and seeks his own way forward. Tokarczuk also favors a new path and, as usual, casts her enthralling spell.
