Tokarczuk never disappoints — an eerie and atmospheric novel with an interesting setting, a mad cast of characters and prose which made me stop in my tracks. Set in a European health resort town in the early 20th century, The Empusium follows a young man who has just checked into a men’s guesthouse hoping for a cure to the ailments which plagued him at home.

I came to this with high expectations, and really wanted to enjoy it. But I haven't read Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain' and so from the outset I felt like I was at a disadvantage. Yes, the writing is superb, and the underlying menace on every page gave the book that 'horror story' impact that it self-proclaims. But I just didn't connect with the central character or the story, and I found myself skim reading just to get through it. Not one for me, I'm afraid, but others rave about it so I put it down to my bad and let's move on.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

Like all of Olga Tokarczuk’s books that I have read and loved this is a strange but fascinating delve into a world I had no idea I needed to visit until I was in it… It is 1913 and Mieczyslaw Wojnicz has arrived at a sanatorium in the Silesian mountains, seeking his health and recovery from a mild case of tuberculosis. He meets fellow patients, as well as doctors and other staff members, and all together it paints an almost alternate society that I found fascinating to follow. Just when he’s starting to settle in, a staff member - a woman he has only briefly seen in passing, he says - is found dead, and this event holds its spectre over the rest of the book. I found discussions between the characters touching at times, philosophical and analytical at others, all the while being borne along by the authors writing style which, I have to be honest, is my happy place. It’s intricate and can lose you in places, but hugely enjoyable all the same.

Based on Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk sends her engineer protagonist Mieczysław, suffering from tuberculosis, to convalesce at a sanatorium in the Silesian mountains. He’s staying in the guesthouse next door, and shortly after arriving there, Mieczysław comes home from a walk to find a dead woman laid out on the dining room table. The owner of the guesthouse, Opitz, apologises for the inconvenience, and bluntly tells Mieczysław that the woman was his wife. That night at dinner, Opitz and his guests ruminate on the idea that a woman’s brain is smaller than a man’s, that women are more emotional, irrational creatures, that possibly they are not entirely human at all. (Tokarczuk notes that these opinions are paraphrased from a vast tradition of male authors, including Jack Kerouac, Ovid, Charles Darwin, and Jean Paul Sartre, among others.)

But something else is not right at the sanatorium. Men die mysteriously every November, and are kept in constant supply of a liquor made from magic mushrooms. There are female spirits everywhere; in the nearby forest, but also in the floorboards, in the walls, in the mushrooms.

It’s a twisty, layered novel — part folktale, part social commentary — written in a similar vein to its 1924 predecessor. Of the Tokarczuk novels I’ve read so far (not enough, tbh. I do have The Book of Jacob on my kindle, but it’s just so massive I’ve not got to it yet), I think this is my favourite.

I knew I would love this book, and I was right.
There is no one else who writes like Olga Tokarczuk, with such distinct characters, eerie settings and twisty endings, I always find myself hooked. The book is slow to get started but the writing is so surprising and engaging on a sentance level you can forgive the long, winding, sexist discussions of these men, knowing that ultimately, no word is lost. In the end, all is as it should be.

Once again, Tokarczuk brings us a delightfully woven tale of human nature and its extremes. Playing with a decidedly Wes-Andersonian style of writing, which is at once idiosyncratic and enjoyable, Tokarczuk takes us through a pseudo-Gothic mystery story in which tension is palpable and the stakes are high.

Sadly this just didn’t work for me. I can see that it’s playful and intelligent and multi-layered and all those things, but if failed to hit the mark, and I was left bewildered more than anything. The basic story (I hesitate to call it a plot) is simple enough. Student Mieczyslaw Wojnicz is sent by his father to a resort in Silesia in search of a cure for his TB. A common enough theme in literature and comparisons to Mann’s Magic Mountain are inevitable. Wojnicz is lodged in a guest house where he interacts, of course, with the other residents, all of whom have their stories to tell and their views to expatiate on. At length. Wojnicz is a sensitive young man and is unnerved right from the start by the unexpected sight of a dead body on the dining room table. From then on he is increasingly unsettled by tales that are told and strange things that happen on the mountain. The subtitle of the novel is “A Health Resort Horror Story” but I rarely felt the horror. Yes, there are nasty things in the forest but they seem bizarre, almost farcical, rather than horrific. Many themes are discussed – misogyny, nationalism, patriarchy, history, folklore – too many in fact as there’s nothing to really grab hold of. Wojnicz is at the heart of the novel but is so passive that he doesn’t manage to hold it all together. Did I miss some of the meanings? Quite possibly. Did I fail to get some of the references? More than likely. Mea culpa, perhaps, rather than the author’s skill. In essence, though, I simply didn’t enjoy it and wasn’t engaged by the characters, none of whom seemed fully rounded and relatable.

I fell in love with Olga Tokarczuk’s writing in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I loved it so much I read it twice in the same year. If I am honest I am still chasing the same experience again, and, although brilliant, neither Flights or The Empusium have quite replicated the experience..

The Empusium is the story of a sanatorium - or ‘health resort’ - in the Silesian Mountains, Poland. It is 1913, the eve of the First World War, and a group of men are receiving treatment. Wojnicz is hoping to be cured of tuberculosis. He is staying in the guesthouse situated near the sanitarium, when returning to his lodgings he finds a dead woman. She is the wife of Opitz who runs the establishment and is presumed to have hung herself. The men receiving treatment assemble for walks, drinks and meals. Awaiting cure or the alternative, they discuss politics, mortality, and women - mostly women. Why women’s brains are different, why they do not deserve the same rights, why they belong to society ..And something sinister and unsettling is going on. The narrator refers to ‘we’, alludes to their observation of the men. In the graveyard Wojnicz makes a disturbing discovery - many of the dead have died in November.

Tokarczuk’s writing is like no other. Dense, delicious, multi-layered, it is hypnotic and mesmerising. I have no idea where she will take me and even though I see that word ‘horror’ I am powerless to resist this writing. It is strange, weird, unsettling but at the same time compelling. Like a camera lens I find the meaning moves in and out of focus and I am endlessly searching for meaning. It is this which makes me want to head back into the novel as soon as I have finished it - what clue did I miss, what meaning did I overlook, what delight alluded me.. Can I tell you exactly what happened - no..It is all rather surreal, and all rather brilliant.

Huge thanks to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo for a digital copy of this book. I have of course bought my own physical copy of this novel!

The Empusium, like Tokarczuk's other writings is a strange, winding mystery, introducing us to the seductive weirdness of nature. The Empusium is set in a sanitorium, and follows the lives of male guests in Gorbersdorf, a strange town with seemingly mystical curing qualities. Our main character Mieczyslaw Wojnicz is a young man suffering from tuberculosis struggling to adjust to this unsettling new place, whilst haunted by visions of the deceased, strange sounds from the attic above him, and battling a strange pull towards the dark forests. He finds himself isolated from the other men of the guesthouse, who constantly argue about politics, religion, the supernatural, and above all - the rights of women. Wojnicz and his only friend Thilio become aware of a curious pattern in Gorbserdorf - a young man seems to die every November. In their visits to cemeteries, and contemplations of art they learn that all is not what it may seem to be, particularly within nature, and even within Wojnicz himself.

Set amidst the falling leaves, lingering decay and thoughts of death that emerge in Autumn, The Empusium is a slow burning thriller, told from the perspective of something entirely other, above all lingers the uncanny feeling of being watched. In this sense it reminded me much of Julia Armfield's Private Rites, Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall, and Tokarczuk's own Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I think this book is the perfect read at this time of year, and Tokarczuk again provides something dark, winding and wonderfully strange. I absolutely devoured this book.

I had high hopes for this book, but unfortunately, it was a DNF for me. The premise is good: a retelling of "The Magic Mountain", with musings on misogyny, war and a feminist spin. However, the characters felt caricatured and never quite turned into satire. There is no strong plot either, which would be okay if this book was at least an essay. While I understand the author's point, this really made it difficult for me to continue reading. I ended up giving up around page 100. What a pity!

hank you to Fitzcarraldo Editions and NetGalley for the ARC copy.

I have wanted to read one of Olga Tokarczuk’s novels for some time, and, having really enjoyed “The Magic Mountain”, I decided to start with this new novel, “The Empusium: A health resort horror story”, which has been described as something of a riff on Mann’s novel.

The location of the sanatorium in the mountains, the pre-WW1 setting, the main protagonist, and men philosophising are among the features which draw on Mann’s work, but “The Empusium” is much more subversive, addressing, amongst other topics, feminism and gender issues, and placing relatively more emphasis on the peculiarities of Russians abroad which may not be that surprising, given that the main protagonist comes from what is now in Ukraine, as well as the author’s Polish heritage. This novel is amusing and satirical, with wonderful descriptions of the landscape and weather, and, although parts are slightly spooky, I thought the “horror” of the sub-title was really more comedic than horrific. It has been beautifully translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

I found it difficult to put this fascinating book down. I must have missed a lot of gems, so look forward to a slower re-read and the opportunity to discuss it with other readers.

Olga Tokarczuk's latest novel The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story makes fun of a lot of things, but it especially enjoys having a laugh at silly men and their silly opinions on women.

The Empusium is about a group of men at a sanatorium on the eve of World War 1 set in Poland. It's a nod to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, but adds a dash of mushroom horror and a big splash of feminism in the mix.

This book made me laugh a lot and I really enjoyed the tongue in cheek writing from Tokarczuk when it came to both fiction and the way these men talk about women. They think that women's bodies belong to mankind because of their ability to birth, they believe that fiction is silly and couldn't give you an example of a female writer because they don't write, but also they wouldn't read it if they do. It's very clear that Tokarczuk has OPINIONS and that's also what I really enjoyed in her novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. I think she does such a great job with the setting of the resort and I could easily imagine this beautiful small town in the mountains, only to have the peaceful rest destroyed by this group of silly men.

What I enjoyed less, was the branding of this book as horror. I read a lot of horror, so I'm probably too picky. The book is a little creepy at the start, but the actual horror finale was a bit of a letdown to me. It doesn't help that I'm also very skeptical of mushroom horror, but I would have liked the finale to feel a bit bigger, stranger and more memorable. I did enjoy the character arc of Wojnicz a lot, so that redeemed the end for me, but mostly I was left wanting just a bit more of that biting satire that I love in Tokarczuk so much.

Special thanks to @fitzcarraldo for the ARC. The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk is out now.

Have you read The Empusium? Or are you planning on reading it? Let me know your thoughts!


#weirdbooks

A young Polish man arrives at a German sanatorium at the beginning of the 20th century. The man meets and gets to know his fellow patients, and starts to learn about some mysterious events that plague the sanatorium.

The book touches upon a plethora of themes - the perennial misogyny that has prevailed culture and discourse, sexual and gender identity, nationalism and associated biases, small town shenanigans, philosophy, etc. In some ways it's lovely, but this is also the main problem with this book. It tries to do way too much, in my view. I struggled to read it and following the narrative - it was rarely clear what this was about, and I couldn't bring myself to care enough about any of it. On a purely intellectual level it was a satisfying read, but from a storytelling perspective - it missed the mark entirely.

And, yes, while there is an element of mystery here, it's more metaphysical in nature. I wouldn't call this a horror story, though there is of a supernatural component to the narrative construct. It doesn't add much to the plot or character development, though. It doesn't even weigh sufficiently on how the characters came across.

What I did like were the last 15% or so, and mostly due to to the revelations about our protagonist and his journey of self discovery and self acceptance. The description of his dialogue with the doctor were particularly arresting. This was the main highlight of the book of book for me.

I recommend to more cerebral readers, and perhaps to fans of The Magic Mountain, which is a clear inspiration for this book. Those seeking the thrill of a well crafted mystery or the anxiety of a horror story will not find any of this here.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

My first Olga Tokarczuk and what a strange and unsettling book to start with.

From reading a few reviews I gather that this book pays a nod to The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. However I've not read that either so I cannot comment. From what I understand though, a lot of the comments on women's psychology come from highly respected psychologists of the day. They are therefore exceptionally funny - and completely bonkers.

The story involves Mieczysław (Mieczyś) Wojnicz who has been sent to a sanatorium in Görbersdorf to recover from tuberculosis. However once he arrives he is confronted with a very strange set-up. Klara Opitz, the wife of the manager, is found hanging having committed suicide; nobody seems to get better (in fact most patients appear to get sicker) and the manager, Willi Opitz, is feeding them Schwärmerei (a strange local drink that renders the drinker insensible) to the extent that noone seems to care if they get well or not.

As Wojnicz continues his stay he finds out that there have been many strange deaths in the area and always in the autumn. Wojnicz is disturbed to find that this is true but does not leave. He becomes fascinated by Frau Opitz's old room and her things, hos friendship with the very sickly Thilo and the mystery of the Tuntschi, representations of women made of stone, sticks and moss which are found on the mountainside and are said to come to life to exact revenge on men.

There's a lot of folklore and history woven into this unnerving little tale and Wojnicz is a very odd character who seems often to have no will of his own. The psychiatrists pronouncements about women are extremely amusing until you remember that these are actually from quotes.

I'd recommend this book if you like strange and unnerving novels. It certainly fits with the time of year.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo for the advance review copy.

Olga Tokarczuk’s ambitious, thought-provoking novel’s loosely based on Thomas Mann’s bildungsroman The Magic Mountain which she frequently rereads. Through the experiences of protagonist Hans Castorp, Mann’s novel examines pre-WW1 European society: competing strands of political thought; the search for meaning in a world in which Nietzsche’s declared God dead. Tokarczuk borrows from Mann’s framework but changes the setting from Swiss TB sanitorium to a version of Hermann Brehmer’s famous sanitorium in an isolated, mountainous valley in Görbersdorf, compressing the action so her story unfolds over several months in 1913.

Tokarczuk’s book features Mieczysław Wojnicz, Polish, in his twenties, like Castorp he’s diffident and sensitive, slightly adrift. Wojnicz travels to Brehmer’s sanitorium for its wellness cure, renting a room in a gentlemen’s guesthouse close to the main complex. His fellow residents seem desperate to command Wojnicz’s attention. These men have an abundance of spare time, caught between hoping to survive and waiting for death. Each night they swig Schwarmerei, a local concoction with hallucinogenic qualities, and engage in heated debates about the nature of things. Each striving to convert Wojnicz to their particular viewpoints. The men vary in their affiliations ranging from conservative Catholic to theosophist yet are united in fear and loathing of women. Theirs is a heteropatriarchal society in microcosm, women are relegated to the margins: useful for domestic labour and/or sex but little else.

Wojnicz listens to the men but rarely reciprocates possibly because he has a secret to keep. He quickly realises he’s not alone in that, the boarding-house and its surrounds are shrouded in mystery: the manager’s wife dies in suspicious circumstances; at night Wojnicz hears strange whisperings in the attics overhead; and there are rumours of macabre occurrences in the woods above the town. These sinister elements build on Mann but give Tokarczuk’s narrative a more pronounced gothic flavour mixed with flashes of folk horror, laced with unsettling undercurrents. The novel’s narration intensifies the atmosphere of unease, borrowing from Aristophanes Tokarczuk shifts between an enigmatic choral perspective and one more aligned to Wojnicz’s. Allusions to classical Greek and Roman texts pervade her story, from the play on Plato’s Symposium in her title, to the mythical Empusa, a terrifying, shape-shifting woman– whose name also conjures Polish tales of witchcraft and malevolent, blood-sucking beings.

As usual, Tokarczuk’s piece is highly referential weaving in aspects of history, myth and folklore: from Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu to the Alpine fable of the Sennentuntschi, a variation on a rape-revenge fantasy involving sex dolls crudely-fashioned by mountain workers – although a more recent find suggests such dolls may not be purely fictional. Tokarczuk picks up on a number of Mann’s themes, his ideas on myth and recurring patterns overlap with her own interest in Jung. But this is recognisably Tokarczuk’s territory from the oblique commentary on speciesism to the condemnation of racism and antisemitism. Like Mann’s, Tokarczuk’s novel traces a line from certain forms of belief to the advent of war. But she also hints at connections between some characters’ worldviews and the later rise of National Socialism, the twisted morality that justified the Holocaust – underlined by making Lviv Wojnicz’s home and placing him in a sanitorium in Silesia. But Tokarczuk’s flagging concerns too over events in contemporary Europe: climate change; the resurgence of far-right nationalism; the war in Ukraine.

However, Tokarczuk’s overriding preoccupation here’s with toxic masculinity, body fascism, destructive gender binaries/species divides, the misogynistic, phallocentric belief systems that have dominated European thought. She deftly exposes these prejudices by having numerous characters spout appalling ideas about women drawn directly from the work of prominent male thinkers and writers from Darwin and Freud to Yeats and Sartre. Tokarczuk then challenges these gendered attitudes through Wojnicz’s personal journey to an unexpected, radical awakening. She constructs scenarios promoting alternative ways of seeing, emphasizing the organic, interspecies networks, fluidity over rigidity – possibly drawn from queer mycology. But she blends concepts centred on the potential for transcendence and the queering of gender with a plea for equal status for so-called ‘women’s’ work within human society – aiming for a world in which the feminine-coded domestic sphere carries as much weight as the male-coded public.

But I found this combination slightly vexing, Tokarczuk’s organic network’s one in which gender should theoretically be dissolved, merging into a greater, interspecies collective. Yet Tokarczuk’s version retains sufficient ‘feminine’ rage to fight against male oppression suggesting conventional gender binaries still retain some force; similarly, Tokarczuk’s specific set of arguments in favour of elevating the status of domestic labour – which I’m obviously all for – sometimes seemed to skirt dangerously close to reinforcing essentialist feminine archetypes. It’s possible that part of the problem, at least for me, was that Tokarczuk's trying to pack too much in, making her narrative overly dense, difficult to negotiate at times, muddling her arguments. But, doubts aside, there’s a lot here I fully support. Overall, a stimulating, engrossing read. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

The main character arrives at a sanatorium in Switzerland in the early 1900s to take the treatment. He is surrounded by a guesthouse of men who pontificate on the superiority of men, among other philosophical points. He is always a bit removed, unsettled and immediately aware of unnerving elements in and around the house. While horror does appear - in what is said and what is done - it is not the driving force of the book. It is the main character's understanding of self. Olga always challenges me. I'm looking up references and reflecting on moments long after I've read them. It's not casual reading. But it is fun and startling.

Olga Tokarczuk’s THE EMPUSIUM (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) takes place in September 1913, and is a subversive take on Thomas Mann’s classic, featuring a spectrum of sickly men cloistered at a Silesian healthcare resort. Of varying age and possessing various identities and ideologies, the unfortunate thread that holds them together in this storied borderlands appears to be constant refrains of a misogynist nature, as well as perhaps a shared economic reality. All are convalescing in the poor man’s version of the neighbouring healthcare facility, that yet retains an uncanny feeling of being out of place and out of time, it’s atmosphere charged with the thrill of transformative potential, a no-man’s land where transcending imposed boundaries, personal or national, might be possible.

Upon this magic mountain, the men spend their days at leisure, engaged in regular verbal jousting to do with clarifying how best to be in this world, in their eyes. But it seems as if other pairs of eyes might be watching, a presence lurking and listening in on their merry debates that nevertheless return to misogynist takes on women who recede into invisibility. In this natural landscape that thrums with life and abundance, the only women that become known to the reader are either dead or live in the margins. The narrator, too, feels like an outsider, a constant companion being someone of a similar age closest to death’s door. Neither can shake the sense that *something* is out to get them all.

Though it wasn’t always pleasant to read through the more misogynistic discussions in the book, the more universal concepts discussed around art and identity and various belief systems rang true. Here voiced by a sickly micro-society of men, the author’s note at the end noted that these were actual documented words once said by a number of well-known, real-life male figures. Everything is a matter of perspective, but it seems that not every perspective matters. I loved how fluidly everything unravelled in the end, flipping the entire narrative on its head on multiple levels, as if reaching across time and space to assert its voice, the voice of the many that have gone unheard in times past and present, ensuring it reverberates well into the future.

A humorous, multi-faceted read that left me reflecting on different aspects of the story afterwards, and that will likely reveal further perspectives again on further re-reads!

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for this complimentary copy!

This was my first Olga Tokarczuk and it won't be my last - loved the premise and the writing was so atmospheric, the translation was beautiful. This book reads a bit like a classic gothic novel but it's very readable and I think I'd get even more from it from a reread now knowing the reveal/denouement at the end. The book is set just before the first World War but the themes within it (misogyny, gender) are clearly still incredibly relevant today and Tokarczuk seamlessly blends gothic horror into social commentary, Iconic authors note too.

The novel blends history, folklore and feminist parable with literary in-jokes and more than a nod to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
There were lots of elements that attracted me to this book: eve of WW1 setting; exploration of misogyny; creeping horror; use of German vocabulary (including plays on words); and allusions to classic German literature. However, with its levels of complexity, this is a novel I would prefer studying and writing essays about rather than as a bedtime read. Without doubt, it's a quality text and possibly a future classic.

Taken from the blurb: In September 1913, Mieczysław Wojnicz, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen. Every day, its residents gather to drink the hallucinogenic local liqueur and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior? As stories of shocking events in the nearby highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone – or something – seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.

On publication, I will post this review on my blog.

The Empusium follows a Polish engineering student, who is sent to a sanatorium/health spa in the German mountains in 1913 to cure his tuberculosis.
He spends the next few months surrounded by a cast of oddball misogynist patients who discuss philosophy, art, politics, their troubling views on women and the mysterious local folklore, all while drinking a strange local liquer and ignoring the strange sounds in the room above.

This story was very different to what I was expecting going in, for the first 60% of the book I wasn't entirely sure I was enjoying it but the whole vibe of the book is very unsettling and I was so curious to find out more, so I persevered. The final quarter of this book is incredible and caught me completely off guard. I recommend going in as blind as possible and trusting the process.

A very unique and thought provoking book, exploring illness/historic medicine, masculinity/gender and perception. I really loved it.