Add Category
FICTION
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
Olga Tokarczuk
Text, $34.99
“I write for intelligent people, not idiots.” Those of us who slogged our way through Olga Tokarczuk’s 1500-page magnum opus, The Books of Jacob, might well have patted ourselves on the back and haughtily taken the Nobel laureate’s words to heart. We had ascended the mountain and were ready to claim the crown.
Intellectual smugness is a prime target of Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel.Credit: Friso Gentsch
It is downright funny, then, that intellectual smugness is a prime target of Tokarczuk’s latest novel, The Empusium. There is, after all, a fine line between intelligence and idiocy.
Subtitled A Health Resort Horror Story, The Empusium harks back to the great novels of early 20th-century European literature, when sanatoria were the proving grounds for big ideas on the page. Tokarczuk has said that she wrote it in conversation with Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, The Magic Mountain – published exactly a century ago – and that she sought to engage with that book’s ideas and interrogate its silences. It could have been a disastrous exercise in high-lit navel-gazing.
Credit:
Instead, The Empusium is an emphatic triumph – a feast of culture, both literary and popular, highbrow and low, that shows Tokarczuk writing at the peak of her powers and enjoying every moment of it.
Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, a young engineering student from Lwow, steps off a train in the small Silesian town of Gorbesdorf. He is headed to the local sanatorium, ostensibly to seek treatment for tuberculosis, but also to rid him of what his father calls his “feminine” inclinations.
In a rather Kafkaesque turn (it’s also the centenary of the Czech great’s death), the sanatorium is full, and so Wojnicz finds lodging at the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a downtrodden hotel populated by an odd assortment of sanatorium rejects.
The men chat, as men of that ilk do, and gather each night over dinner to debate the big issues of the day. Democracy. Religion. Philosophy. Race. After a few swigs of schwarmerei, a mildly hallucinogenic local brew, they always land on the same topic: women. Or, more precisely, the inferiority of women. Women have smaller brains. They are further back on the evolutionary scale. They ought not have rights. Their bodies belong to men. Of course, women are absent from the conversation. They are all but absent from the book.