The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk

🎧 Paired Listening — When I Was Done Dying by Dan Deacon

🌊 Acqua Alta —+130 (passerelle) 

📖 Read In Autumn, At A Cafe

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk is set in Görbersdorf, a village in the Silesian mountains (now Sokołowsko, in present-day southwestern Poland) at a wellness retreat in 1913, on the eve of World War I. It owes a huge debt to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, echoing its setting, its cast of characters, and its atmosphere. 

Our protagonist, Mieczysław Wojnicz, is a young student from Lwów (present-day Lviv), in awe of and confused by women, having only grown up with his father, uncle, and housemaid/nanny after losing his mother early on. The novel follows him as he settles in at the wellness center to cure himself of tuberculosis. The fact of him having any illness at all marks him with a feminine quality he’s desperate to rid himself of. What we can say about Wojnicz is that he is trying his hardest to be good and masculine, to please his father. There is a childlike sense of wonder and spirit in him that is endearing against the backdrop of the older, more adult, male patients.

From a narrative standpoint, there is a spookiness lurking beneath the surface that comes to the fore through the narrator's occasional slip into the plural "we," when observing Wojnicz. These slips fold you, the reader, into a voyeuristic group you didn't necessarily ask to join. Related, though you won't learn how until you read the book yourself, we learn soon enough, from an ailing patient named Thilo, that something strange happens in the village every November. This fact is borne out in a chilling scene at a graveyard, where November death dates are carved in headstone after headstone, year after year. The veracity of this strange phenomenon spreads like juicy gossip with increasing intensity as you turn the page. Time moves strangely throughout the novel in general, but increasingly so as it progresses, in part due to a homemade hallucinogenic mushroom drink the characters consume. This drink stretches days into weeks, and leaves large gaps of unaccounted memory.

If the novel were a rock rolling downhill, it would pick up speed about two-thirds of the way down. As the story edges closer to November, everything begins to unravel. The mysteries begin to burst open into unfeasible truths, and the line between the natural and supernatural blurs. On that note, towards the end of the book, there appears a thread concerning the gender of the protagonist that doesn’t necessarily land the way the author may have intended. Sure, the beginning pages contain slow passages anchored by conversations on women as objects between the male patients, but these conversations are cut and dry: misogynistic takes by men who speak with authority, bolstering their views with thousands of years of history and jargon in every field, from mathematics to philosophy to classical history. So, while gender is a subject and the place of man and woman is always being hashed out, they never seem to call Wojnicz into question. That somewhat hastily changes at the very end.

There is a wonderful page at the end of the novel that reads “All the misogynistic views on the topic of women and their place in the world are paraphrased from texts by the following authors…” and proceeds to list household names such as Charles Darwin, Plato, Joseph Conrad, etc. I thought this was extremely impactful. To hear these notions of women spoken from less eloquent, less revered mouths was to remind ourselves what these values really mean. Even if you haven’t read Mann’s text, it’s in these moments that you gather Tokarczuk’s is a rebuttal. 

Like Mann's novel, the sense of the coming turmoil on the eve of the World Wars hangs over everything: you know it will rewrite the history of the town, the resort, and everyone touched by it. That’s why the gender element felt a bit gratuitous to me. But still, this was an exceptionally entertaining, captivating, moving read. I certainly think this book warrants a second attempt, and will probably be fuller upon it.