The Empusium - Olga Tokarczuk
The Empusium is a novel about a young man, named Mieczyslaw Wojnicz (pronounced: Mi-etchy-swuff Voy-nitch) who has a mild case of Tuberculosis. He takes it upon himself to travel to Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentleman in the Silesian Mountains, where residents are cared for during their stay. Little does Wojnicz know that the health resort he’s at starts to become a trip full of sinister nightmares.
People die. Hallucinations occur. Eerie noises are heard. And deep philosophical conversations stir emotions. It’s a novel full of deep, thought provoking messages surrounding life and the world lived in before the wars began. Translated concisely by Antonia Lloyd-Jones from Polish to English, written originally by Olga Tokarczuk, who tells the tale with long bouts of description that capture the scenes unfolding with clear powerful imagery and hair-raising action.
It’s heavy on description and quite minimal on dialogue, which I personally find quite difficult to get through. Tokarczuk approached it splendidly, with real sophistication that told the story in an elegant way, but I’m not a fan of long winded passages that sometimes lose my undivided attention because they go too long without the action of people conversing. Dialogue carries a story as well, and I find it more engaging when the characters too are telling the story through words. But - especially in the final thrilling scene - I began to understand how description over dialogue can be quite a bit more powerful. There was no need for speech, the feelings and inner thoughts of Tokarczuk’s protagonist was enough to create a horrific scene that left me with a spine-chilling, and quite harrowing feeling inside. And that’s exactly what I expect from a horror story.
At times I felt it was a little confusing, with certain concepts being mentioned once and then never mentioned again until 70 or 80 pages later, and by then I’d forgotten all about that idea which had me lost at times; questioning what was meant by a certain phrase, or what was actually happening at a certain time. On top of the jumping back and forth; as an English speaker, name referrals were something I didn’t fully understand or follow too easily. Sometimes people were called different names to the names they’d been originally referred to, with honourifics that I’m not familiar with at all, and this chopped and changed which had me concentrating hard on each little detail in each masterfully described scene.
However, the key at the beginning of the book was useful a reference for when I got bewildered by the various number of titles and names of characters used to propel the story along. I do however, solely respect their way of addressing people, it just wasn’t something I’m used to as I’m not a fluent Polish or German speaker.
A translated novel like this made a change from reading books written by English speaking author’s. This is something that pushed me out of my comfort zone. I selected a book that I know will reach a few people immediately, and perhaps it’ll sway the minds of those who only ever stick to romance, or sci-fi, or even fantasy, because I know it pulled me out of my typical books of choice and I don’t see why it wouldn’t draw others away from their standard novels either.
The Empusium was certainly a new kind of horror story that compelled me right through to end, with creepy happenings that were key milestones carrying Wojnicz through his stay at the health resort. With characters who expressed their anticipation for the future, inflicting fear and anxiety upon Wojnicz which as a reader I felt as well. It’s a place I wouldn’t want to be in, and Tokarczuk did an excellent job of making me feel that way. I give her four stars for a brilliant, magical story drawn from ideas all over. Starting with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain to phrases taken from author’s such as Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare, Johnathan Swift and many more.
If you like who Tokarczuk has referenced, or you simply like the idea of a health resort gone wrong in a completely disturbing and unnatural way, this is the book for you. Otherwise, get out of your comfort zone, you might like it, and she’s got plenty of other books too which are just as wonderful and worth the read but I’m yet to give them a go myself.
So for now, I’ll stick to The Empusium, where horror meets health resort in the 1910s.
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