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A Health Resort Horror Story
by Olga Tokarczuk
Book Reviewed by:The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.
September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.
A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, with signature boldness, inventiveness, humor, and bravura.
THE GUESTHOUSE FOR GENTLEMEN
The view is obscured by clouds of steam from the locomotive that trail along the platform. To see everything we must look beneath them, let ourselves be momentarily blinded by the gray haze, until the vision that emerges after this trial run is sharp, incisive and all-seeing.
Then we shall catch sight of the platform flagstones, squares overgrown with the stalks of feeble little plants—a space trying at any cost to keep order and symmetry.
Soon after, a left shoe appears on them, brown, leather, not brand-new, and is immediately joined by a second, right shoe; this one looks even shabbier—its toe is rather scuffed, and there are some lighter patches on the upper. For a moment the shoes stand still, indecisively, but then the left one advances. This movement briefly exposes a black cotton sock beneath a trouser leg. Black recurs in the tails of an unbuttoned wool coat; the day is warm. A small hand, pale and bloodless, holds a brown leather suitcase...
Like the body of Frau Opitz on the dining-room table, women are at the center of Tokarczuk's narrative without ever speaking a word. The Empusium features vanishingly few female characters, but their qualities and—more precisely—their defects are the obsession of the isolated male guests. As Wojnicz comes to realize, "every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women." To say too much would spoil the twists of the novel's brilliant final third, but just as the spirits haunting the mountain forest call into question what is real and what is not, so too does the presence of this young student come to disprove the inflexible divisions—"black and white, day and night, up and down, man and woman"—by which the other male guests understand their world. While Tokarczuk's other characters can at times fall into caricature, her portrayal of Wojnicz's journey to self-realization consistently provides a devastating emotional weight to the novel, right up to its final gripping pages...continued
Full Review
(741 words)
(Reviewed by Alex Russell).
_min.jpg "Sokołowsko (Görbersdorf), 2014")
Olga Tokarczuk's novel The Empusium is set in the mountain health resort of Görbersdorf (modern day Sokołowsko in Poland) in 1913. Renowned for its tuberculosis sanitorium, the town fit into a context of around 600 similar resorts in Europe that focused on recovery from then-incurable diseases, as well as overall wellness. The eve of the First World War turned out to be a high-water mark for these spa and health resorts, which had developed over the centuries into luxurious destinations for the continent's elite.
The healing properties of hot springs have been a subject of human interest on a global level since antiquity, but it wasn't until the 1700s that a veritable industry began popping up in Europe's spa towns. ...
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