The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

This is the fifth novel by Poland’s Nobel laureate Tokarczuk (The Books of David) to be translated into English. Similarities with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain abound. Tokarczuk’s novel is about a tuberculosis sanatorium less than 400 miles from where Mann’s tale is set and also in the same time period, before the start of the Great War, with a naive innocent, the observer, and men who like to talk more than act. But unlike Mountain, this is no novel of ideas. Its interlocutors mouth only platitudes, especially opinions about women’s inferiority and smaller brains and how they are good only for childbearing. (Their mouthings echo the judgments of the cream of the Western canon, notes Tokarczuk, from Hesiod and Augustine to Swift, Wagner, and Yeats.) Around this pseudo-philosophizing, Tokarczuk weaves a gothic story. Every year, at the same time, someone is butchered, and his remains scattered outside the town. Plot elements cross but don’t intersect. The sanatorium’s residents posture, trying to force a blurred world into black-and-white terms, while the time for another killing draws nigh. It’s a puzzling join.