A ‘Health Resort Horror Story’ From a Nobel Laureate

THE EMPUSIUM: A Health Resort Horror Story, by Olga Tokarczuk. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

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.