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Olga Tokarczuk: Empuzjon (Empusium)
Our hero is Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, a young Polish student of hydroengineering from Lwow (but which we now know as Lviv, in Ukraine) We are in1913. He has arrived at the sanatorium in Görbersdorf but now called Sokołowsko. He has come to be cured of tuberculosis . Yes, we are in full Magic Mountain territory though, of course the two books are very different.
Mieczyslaw has something of an ambiguous relationship with his father, a retired civil servant and landowner. He clearly loves his son but is certainly not going to show any sentimentality or any of the ‘female emotions’ that he so abhorred. Mieczyslaw has his own quirks. He is paranoid, fearful of anyone spying on him and he will not be seen naked, even by a doctor, apparently because of a shameful affliction. His father wants him to be a soldier (like the father’s brother) and become a real man but clearly this is not going to happen so the compromise is that he can help the fatherland by becoming an engineer. He starts his studies but contracts tuberculosis and ends up in Görbersdorf.
The Kursaal itself is full and also expensive so a few of the patients stay in a boarding house run by Wilhelm Opitz. Much of the action is set either in this boarding house or involving the people staying there. The patients, all male, form a close-knit group and we hear their views on a variety of subjects, such as the treatment they are following, the institution, the local village and the neighbourhood, ghosts and devils but also on weightier issues such as politics, religion (as a whole), women, Western civilisation (mankind as produced by Western civilisation had reached the limit of its development), technology and how it is advancing and the strange things that go on in the boarding house and the local area.
Considering that is 1913 we get remarkably little on the impending war, German rearmament (land, sea and air) or on the upheaval going on in Russia, though we do get a brief reference to the Poles’ perpetual fear of Russian invasion.
Wojnicz had a troubled childhood. His mother died soon after he was born and he was brought up by a housekeeper and his father, who wanted him to be a manly man, which was never going to happen. Now he feels that he is going to die. However he more or less gets on with his fellow residents. But there are strange goings-on. He hears odd noises. Some he can explain – the various coughs of his fellow residents, the rutting of stags – but others he cannot. Soon after he arrives he goes into the dining room and sees something lying on the table. He quickly identifies it as a woman and also soon realises that she is dead. Opitz turns up and says that it is his wife and she had hanged herself. Her body is removed and all attend the funeral. Other residents say that he had been very cruel to his wife. Wojnicz finds that her room is near his and he frequently visits it.
This raises the whole issue of women in this book. We see very few women in tis book. As mentioned we meet Frau Opitz only after her death. The very few other women are not portrayed well. Two women – Frau Weber and Frau Brecht – who seem to spend much of their time. sitting near the boarding house are described as looking grim and ugly. In particular all the men in the boarding house seem to be thoroughly misogynistic. We get numerous examples of this throughout the book, starting with Wojnicz’s uncle who says Woman, frog and devil, these are siblings treble while Whether we like it or not, motherhood is the one and only thing that justifies the existence of this troublesome sex is just one of the many similar remarks made by his fellow residents.
The boarding house residents take many walks in the area for their health and discover various aspects of the region. The institution surprisingly has no cemetery. The local charcoal burners are somewhat weird and even make models of women out of moss twigs, stones, etc. for their sexual gratification. However strange things happen, possibly involving them. Most of the people who are buried in the cemetery seem to have died in November. We also learn that every year someone is killed and his – it is invariably a man – body is torn to pieces and scattered around the forest. The victim used to be one of the locals. More recently it has been a patient at the institution.
We also follow the treatment . Inevitably some get better and some do not. Wojnicz does not enjoy the treatment or particularly like the doctor, called Semperweiss (=Always White) – and, as already mentioned, refuses to undress for him, to the doctor’s annoyance, claiming religious reasons. The nurse is one of the women who is not treated well in this book. The doctor claims the locals are superstitious and believes there will be a cure for tuberculosis. Indeed he describes what we will know as antibiotics.
The book opens with a quotation from Fernando Pessoa: The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows, which, to a certain degree, sums up this novel. Wojnicz tries to focus on his illness and treatment but he and we are aware that there other things going on, perhaps explicable, perhaps beyond their understanding. This sense of menace that hangs over the novel is par for the course for Tokarczuk and, as in her other works, makes this book a most interesting read as you never quite know what is going to happen. And if, like me, you were bemused by the title, it comes from Empusa, a shape-shifting, one-legged woman from Greek legend.
First published in 2022 by Wydawnictwo Literackie
First published in English in 2024 by Fitzcarraldo
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones