It is 1913, the last year of an old European social order that is about to immolate itself on the pyre of World War I. Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, a shy and sickly student, arrives at a health resort in the Silesian mountain village of Görbersdorf, in what is now Poland. He is there to be cured of tuberculosis, and his wealthy father has booked him into the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, near the huge redbrick sanitarium where he will be treated.
The Guesthouse for Gentlemen is a respectable but middling establishment, run by Opitz, a taciturn Swiss. The other guests come from a variety of backgrounds and have different outlooks and politics: The Catholic traditionalist sits with the theosophist mystic and the socialist humanist. Shortly after his arrival, Wojnicz returns to his lodgings to find a woman he has assumed to be a household servant lying dead on the dining table.
Opitz explains bluntly that the woman hanged herself — and that she was his wife. He seems barely touched by this loss, and that evening he joins his guests at dinner, where there is a discussion of the irrationality of women, the smaller size of the female brain and the possibility that women are not fully human, “at once a subject and an object,” merely mimicking the intelligent communication of men.
The extreme misogyny of the guesthouse gentlemen runs like a vein of poison through “The Empusium,” Olga Tokarczuk’s deft and disturbing new novel. In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s crisp translation, Tokarczuk tells a folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone. Something is not right in Görbersdorf. Wojnicz makes a friend at the guesthouse, a seriously ill young aesthete who confides in him the terrible secret of the place. Every year around the first full moon in November, a man, sometimes two, is torn to pieces in the forest: “The landscape takes its sacrifice and kills a man.” The reason for these deaths is unknown, but as Wojnicz discovers, the forest is a strange and unsettling neighbor, a force of darkness and unreason pressing up against the white clinical world of the sanitarium.
Wojnicz is a naïve and rather passive observer, his faculties of judgment impaired more than a little by Schwärmerei (German for infatuation, or excessive emotion), a mysterious digestive liqueur that has, as one of its ingredients, magic mushrooms gathered from the forest. The men at the guesthouse consume prodigious quantities of the stuff, and as Wojnicz takes the forest into his body, he is drawn ever closer to the horror concealed by the brittle veneer of masculine civilization. He becomes a low-status member of a pack, taken to eat luridly unpleasant local delicacies such as a noodle dish made with parasitic ribbon worms and made to listen to his companions pontificating endlessly about male superiority.
“There are no women in the history of literature,” they conclude, “just as there are none in science.” In an author’s note, Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, explains that the views of the guesthouse men have been paraphrased from a list of canonical authors, ranging from Ovid to Jack Kerouac. They speak out of a tradition.
Tokarczuk knows her setting intimately. She grew up in the region, and lives in a valley not far from Sokolowsko, formerly Görbersdorf. On the internet, you can see pictures of the old sanitarium, fallen into disrepair. Against the clinical world of the sanitarium, she takes Wojnicz on Schwärmerei-fueled trips through the woods in which the natural world appears transcendentally beautiful, “a church full of labyrinths … a place of constant change: of water into life, and of light into matter.” Once part of the Hapsburg Empire, then of Prussia, these borderlands also provided the setting for Tokarczuk’s “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” another novel in which nature goes to war against the state and the social world, with a fragile outsider at its center.
“The Empusium” takes its name from the Empusa, a female shape-shifter in ancient Greek mythology. The mysteries of Görbersdorf revolve around gender. Wojnicz comes from a culture that values hard, active masculinity: “His father believed that blame for both national disasters and educational failures lay with soft upbringing that encouraged girlishness, mawkishness and passivity.”
Wojnicz’s physical self-consciousness and sexual inexperience — not to mention his TB — feminize him, making him vulnerable in the world of men, slipping perilously close to being “at once a subject and an object,” a subhuman that can be disposed of freely. Deep in the woods, he comes across a Tuntschi, a “puppet made of moss, sticks, dry pine needles and rotten wood” with “between the legs … a dark, narrow hole, a tunnel into the depths of this organic forest body.” He is fascinated and repulsed, hearing rumors that it is the work of charcoal burners, feral forest dwellers who use it for sexual gratification.
Any Central European novel about a sanitarium is automatically in conversation with “The Magic Mountain,” Thomas Mann’s epic of stasis and suspended time, in which the young bourgeois Hans Castorp visits his tubercular cousin, a resident of a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps. After Castorp himself is diagnosed, his three-week stay turns into seven years. From his perch up in the mountains, he struggles, metaphorically, with the great questions of his age, “the ideological struggle,” as Georg Lukacs put it, “between life and death, health and sickness, reaction and democracy.”
Wojnicz is a shadow or double of Castorp, but in Tokarczuk’s elegant and genuinely unsettling novel, the battle lines are different. The various political stances of the men at the guesthouse are meaningless. In the end all that counts is the conflict between brutal masculine supremacism and an unappeasable feminine forest energy, multiple, chaotic and, if it wants to be, equally violent.
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