Man, Olga Tokarczuk‘s latest book was a chore. I read The Magic Mountain recently in preparation for this one, and maybe I read the two too closely together. Rather than a feeling of nostalgia for Mann’s mountain sanatorium setting, the fatigue set in almost immediately with The Empusium.
It starts familiarly enough: Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, a regular young man arrives in a small mountain village with a mild case of tuberculosis. The mountain air is healthy, and hours of exercise and ‘rest-cure’ will surely heal the condition. As he settles in, he spends a lot of time with the other patients primarily walking and eating.
It diverges from Mann’s work pretty quickly. There’s no room at the sanatorium, so he’s staying at a kind of boarding house. While there are common elements – two characters that argue constantly about esoteric things, the looming war in Europe, and others – but Tokarczuk’s story establishes itself as a mystery and horror-ish story very early, when a body is discovered.
The story meanders, with a sense of dread and fantasy about it, but it never really pulled me in. More than once I had to talk myself into picking it up. When I did, as much as the story felt like a grind, I was always taken with the writing. Lincoln Michel writes about her style here, and how it separates itself from most current fiction writing. There’s a novel narrative trick that Tokarczuk uses when she slips into plural first-person language – where Mann sometimes broke the fourth wall to discuss what was coming or how time passes, this one is decidedly weirder.
The feminist themes are as subtle as a poke in the eye, but they are a highlight. The characters in The Empusium are all men — the deceased is a woman, and there are a few that are referenced throughout the story, but I don’t think any of them even speak. Tokarczuk’s men engage in worse and worse misogyny as the novel progresses. In the Afterword, she notes that the men’s nasty ideas about women were taken from prominent thinkers and writers: Charles Darwin, Ezra Pound, and Jack Kerouac among them. It would be cartoonish if it wasn’t so ugly.
Several days after finishing it, what I remember is what a chore The Empusium felt like for long stretches, despite being much, much shorter than Mann’s book. There is very little subtlety in this book, which shouldn’t be surprising given Tokarczuk’s previous novels. The final reveal felt too little too late to redeem what came before it.
I’m willing to accept that I’m not the right reader here, or maybe just not at the right time. In any case, while I respect and admire Tokarczuk, I’ll probably not rush into picking up her next book.
Further Reading
Lincoln Michel on The Empusium
Very Spoiler-ful review in Vulture
