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Review

‘The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story’: A stirring sanatorium novel

Being cured of tuberculosis in a small mountain town turns into a haunting tale of a village fighting against nature in Olga Tokarczuk's 'The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story.

It is September 1913, and Mieczysław Wojnicz, a young Pole, has just arrived in the sanatorium town of Görbersdorf to be cured of tuberculosis.

A “sanatorium novel” immediately brings to mind Thomas Mann, and there are indeed echoes of The Magic Mountain here. But this is fully and recognisably an Olga Tokarczuk novel, driven by the feminist and ecocritical concerns that mark her oeuvre.

The Sudetes Mountains (today the Polish-Czech borderland where the Nobel Prize-winner lives) become the stage for a conflict between men, women and nature. Try as they might, the patients cannot fully retreat from the world. Villagers, the past and the mountains themselves constantly intrude, trapping the visitors in an endless cycle of rest cures, water cures, psychedelic mushroom liqueur and misogyny.

By November, Mieczysław has discovered that Görbersdorf itself is sick; the bloody reckoning at the novel’s climax is a haunting prefiguration of the region’s dark 20th century.