The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk
New York. Riverside Books. 2024. 320 pages.
The Empusium, by the acclaimed Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a departure from her usual work. The novel is set not in the present but in a men’s health resort, a tuberculosis clinic in the Silesian mountains near the village of Görbersdorf in 1913, in what is now southwestern Poland. It immediately calls to mind Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), in which a naïve protagonist suffering from tuberculosis meets an international group of patients who teach him about sickness and death. Tokarczuk’s darkly comic novel takes on mythological proportions, covering misogyny, shape-shifting, the distance between reality and the imagination, and the dangers of too deep an immersion in a natural world that can easily lead characters into madness. As the gravely ill Thilo observes, “The landscape can kill.”
The protagonist, a newly arrived Polish youth in his twenties named Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, occupies an anomalous position. He displays feminine traits that his father forbids. Other patients exploit his difference for their own ends. He has always been a subject of observation and fears being watched and judged. He risks becoming a target in this male-dominated environment. One of the few women at the spa, Frau Optiz, dies by suicide the day after Mieczyslaw arrives. He is shocked to find her corpse laid out on the dining room table.
The savage charcoal burners lurking outside the hospital devise a puppet of moss, a Tuntschi, to which they sacrifice vulnerable men. Ancient stories connect runaway women to witches who long ago disappeared into the forest to haunt the unwary. Fears of ghosts preoccupy otherwise rational men. In an atmosphere where anything can happen, madness overcomes even the most practical minds.
In Tokarczuk’s world, the only escape is to exorcize those demons by turning their own terror against them. In this way they eradicate the illness of mind and body. Those who accept freedom leave the hospital. Those who succumb to the lure of the unholy disappear and are forgotten. As World War I looms, former patients find ways to serve a new order that brings with it unimaginable destruction.
Elizabeth Fifer
Center Valley, Pennsylvania
