A horror story – not my usual thing.
Olga Tokarczuk – I have heard of her but never read her work.
A nod to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain – a novel I’ve not read.
Empusium – I could not find a definition.
The story begins in September 1913. We meet a young Pole, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, who is suffering from tuberculosis as he arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf.
This is a health resort in the Silesian mountains. We meet the staff. We see the beautifully described landscape. The director's wife commits suicide. Life goes on as normal.
Each night the residents of the resort meet to take a hallucinogenic local liqueur and we read their conversations as they interact. Together they discuss the great issues of the day: should there be a Monarchy or should democracy prevail? Do devils exist? We are asked if women are born inferior? Must there be war, how do we find peace?
The residents' place in the novel seems ambivalent. But they decide that the female brain is smaller than a male's; that women are delicate and sensitive, and impulsive. They find that women are at an earlier stage of human evolution and that because women are socially challenged, they must always rely on men.
Misogynistically, they decide that the female body belongs not to individual women, but to humankind in general. They affirm that nature having endowed men with fertility, nature didn’t give the female the ability to control it.
It is painful to read these views. Despite this, Tokarczuk assures her readers that all the misogynist passages in Empusium are taken from writings including such as St Augustine, Conrad, Darwin, Freud, Hesiod, Lawrence, Milton, Nietzsche, Plato, Racine, Shakespeare, Swift, Wagner, and Yeats. The residents of Herr Opitz’s guesthouse are obsessed with patriarchal ideas. To them, patriarchy is the natural order.
How does this all impact on the story that flows from these people? You will need to read the novel to find out!
Tokarczuk tells us that, as life goes on in the sanatorium, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding forest and hills. There seems to be someone, or something, watching them, attempting to penetrate their sheltered world. As Wojnicz tries to unravel the truth and the malevolent forces outside the guesthouse, fate has already chosen the next target.
What is Empusium? Tokarczuk has come up with her own definition, melding together roots Empousa and symposion. But who, or what, is the Empousa? I quote from Samuel Tchorek-Bentall: "In the comedies of the playwright Aristophanes, she is described as an enormous shapeshifting beast, a bull at one moment, then a mule, then a beautiful woman, then a bitch. Her entire face is on fire, one of her legs is made of bronze, the other of cow dung. Meanwhile, in the third-century Life of Apollonius of Tyana, she makes an appearance as a man-eating spectre, a being 'little affected by the passion of love,' fond of nothing but male flesh."
Need I say more?
This is an amazing book, mysterious and exciting. We have to read on to learn the outcome: it is as if we are taken over by the threatening forces in the book, compelled to turn the next page, to discover who the evil spirits actually are.
Obviously, Tokarczuk doesn’t take the misogynistic beliefs of her characters seriously. Consequently, the best parts of the novel are not the rather self-indulgent dronings of the patients, but the signs of malevolence that keep appearing: the slimy toad, the headless duck, the mystical female figures created from moss, sticks, fir needles, rotten wood, and other organic materials, which the perverse coalmen use.
The Empusium is not an easy read, but it is astutely written. The style is old fashioned, but this matches its setting in the 1910s, and adds to the intensity of the tale. Who or what is the malignancy that threatens? Who will survive to tell the tale? It is intoxicating.
A horror story – perhaps I should read more.
Olga Tokarczuk – I need to read more of her work.
A nod to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain – I must read it.
Empusium - a sexist symposium that Tokarczuk dubs an empuzjon, a neologism derived from the Greek Empousa and modelled, incorrectly from a strictly philological point of view, on symposion, the Greek word for "banquet."
Jon Wilkins is 68. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. Next year he takes up the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA. The game's afoot!
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