The league of extraordinarily misogynistic gentlemen: Olga Tokarczuk’s new novel is a hair-raising horror story of patriarchy and male desire.
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Riverhead Books, 300 pages, $30
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Unlike Wydawnictwo Literackie of Kraków, which first published The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story in Polish in 2022, Olga Tokarczuk’s US publisher, an imprint of Penguin Random House, promotes the Nobel Prize winner’s latest novel as a reprise of Thomas Mann’s canonical The Magic Mountain. The time period, setting, and the core group of protagonists of The Empusium seem to eagerly invite a publicity-making association of this kind—the brink of World War I, a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in picturesque mountains, and a small group of men under treatment, each supposedly representing a different facet of society. The book takes place at a guesthouse for gentlemen in Görbersdorf, today’s Sokołowsko, in the now-Polish Sudeten Mountains—that is, on the opposite extreme of the healing-waters belt from Davos, Switzerland, where The Magic Mountain was set. Inhabited by incessantly talking and strolling male patients, it dutifully nods to Mann’s narrative arc, following a sickly young man on the eve of the First Great War. But don’t be deceived by these easy parallels. In fact, The Empusium constitutes both a screeching and eloquent critique and teardown of the literary and cultural heritage of so-called Modern Europe (nationalism and its antitheses included), one dressed in a supernatural tone. Bringing all this shit down—Mann not immune from this relentless assault—is its very goal.
The novel mainly tracks the point of view of the innocent and frail Mieczysław “Mieczyś” Wojnicz—a sanitation-engineering student from Lwów, a then Polish-claimed city under Austro-Hungarian partition. He is part of a cohort of “gentlemen” at the guesthouse that includes a fourth-dimension-obsessed, philosophizing undercover policeman from Breslau (today’s Wrocław), Mr. Frommer; an impassioned lover of ancient Greek civilization from Vienna, Mr. August; and a catastrophizing Catholic from Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad), Mr. Lukas. Their ceaseless deliberations revolve around women. They presume that “a woman’s body belongs not only to her, but to mankind” because of her “great power of giving birth.” However, “with their unbridled biological behavior, with their disturbing proximity to nature—they were the factor that destabilized the social order.” “They should not be allowed into cafés.” In turn, “male desire must be instantly satisfied, otherwise the world would collapse in chaos.” These men think the world is and should be ruled, regulated, ordered, and led by them. Alas, they are dead wrong, and their deaths do not only result from the bacteria devouring their lungs—hence, the titular horror (and, no, the horror is not the encroaching war). Since the novel’s plot develops at a glacial pace, the narrative at first minutely descriptive, before it finally reveals hair-raising twists and turns right at the end, I shall say no more to avoid spoilers. But I can say that, certainly, two of the horrors here are patriarchy and the idea of manliness. And if the idea of manliness can be ethnically tinged and inflected, the Polish version is a particularly nasty kind.
If I’ve been yearning for a truly feminist fiction, I found it in The Empusium, even though women seem for the most part—and glaringly—the objects rather than the subjects of the novel. They are observed, debated, analyzed, theorized, and used; women are consistently perceived and referred to as things, in all senses of the word. For example, the object of Mieczyś’s apparent infatuation, a tall, young, attractive female patient, is simply known as Frau Large Hat: woman and thing are one and the same. There is one key exception: an important early protagonist, the guesthouse proprietor’s unnamed wife, who serves as the pension’s barely visible cleaner and cook, and whose only decisive action is to (allegedly) take her own life. The reader never learns what truly happened to her—the first episode in the series of horrors the novel gradually relays.
If Mann’s ploy was to put forth all kinds of subjects pertaining to a disturbing society on the brink of disintegration, for Tokarczuk, those subjects constitute mentions in passing. What and who really matters are women and the patriarchy they are subject to. Perhaps the book’s most satisfying part is the author’s note at the end, in which Tokarczuk offers an impressive list of the names of men considered titans of Western literature and thought, from Plato and Hesiod in ancient Greece to William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac in the “rebellious” post-mid-twentieth-century United States. The list is preceded by a succinct statement: “All the misogynistic views on the topic of women and their place in the world are paraphrased from texts by the following authors.” In other words, this is the world we have inherited.
Then, there is also the intensely material, fleshy world in which this story is set. With The Empusium, Tokarczuk returns to her home territory—the Sudeten, Lower Silesia, where she has always been at her best. I have never been convinced by her fiction that takes place far away from the region where she has lived for the past three decades. To me, both her celebrated Flights and The Books of Jacob ring hollow and bombastic, deprived of her very specific cultural knowledge and mastery of nuanced local details. In turn, much like Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead and the even earlier House of Day, House of Night (both virtuosically translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who is also the translator of this novel), The Empusium conjures the complex magic of this complicated region.
The zone—now at the borderlands of Poland, Czech Republic, and Germany—has constituted the site of struggle for all kinds of peoples, national alliance notwithstanding. (Who, in the sense, is a “Silesian”? What do you make of the people forcibly moved from now-Ukraine after 1945, who have called those lands their “home” under the Polish banner after WWII?) And unlike the “young” Alps where Mann reigned, the Sudeten are old mountains, in the geological sense. Here, seemingly unperishable rock is transformed and deformed, subjugated to the elements that, in the era of The Empusium, were considered healing: air and water, including moisture. This supposedly “healing” matter transmutes the mountains into something “other” to themselves—and also disturbs the expectations of landscape, a painterly genre that matters a lot to Tokarczuk in this novel.
Mieczyś’s sole intimate interlocutor is an aspiring art historian and student of landscape from Berlin, Thilo von Hahn. From his deathbed, Thilo introduces naïve Mieczyś to a painting both captivating and terrorizing, in which an ostensibly straightforward, iconic biblical mountainscape reveals a hidden layer—a monstrous, shimmering force capable of killing a person. The land is not only what we suppose it is. To me, and to Tokarczuk, the primordial stones and their allied ecosystems are also inhabited by entities that can disturb and destroy the man-made world that has been handed to us. Long live the beings that have been watching Mieczyś and his companions from the moment they set their feet on Görbersdorf’s ground! These beings remain unseen and unnamed until the novel’s climactic finale. Read the book to find out how, and by whom, and to what ends, you are being observed.
Dorota Biczel teaches art history and theory at Barnard College and occasionally curates exhibitions. She is currently working on a book, Precarious Subjects: Non-object-based Art, Migrations, and Political Transitions in Peru, 1968–1990.