Description

By (author) Tokarczuk Olga; Translated by Lloyd-Jones Antonia

Short /annotation:

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate’s latest masterwork, set in a sanatorium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, a young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, 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, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.

Review quote:

‘Tokarczuk’s fiction is built on filtering fragments of the past – people, stories, myths, orthodoxies – through a contemporary lens…. The Empusium is much less a debate of ideas than a study of our perception and the limits of sensory experience. Reality, or rather its elusiveness, preoccupies much of Tokarczuk’s work, which frequently blends genres as a way to get closer to, if not at, what’s true…. Grotesque sexism aside, there is spectacular humour to these scenes as the grandeur of their self-image is so elegantly undermined by the narrator’sof them…. This too is a novel that in Tokarczuk’s dexterous hands transcends its own limits, further cementing the Nobel laureate as one of the most original storytellers of our age.’
— Matthew Janney, Financial Times

Review quote:

‘Despite the large (if mischievous) debt to The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk makes this novel all her own with her idiosyncratic blend of registers and genres. She is both a collagist and a doodler, a freewheeling improvisator taking her narrative line for a gloriously erratic walk…. In Lloyd-Jones’s poised translation, Tokarczuk’s puckishness gleams brightly. The best passages in this new novel are weird, lyrical rhapsodies describing the natural world through the all-seeing eyes of those mysteriously plural narrators…. Happily, all the various unlikely strands come together in the closing chapters. The eerily majestic finale is haunting, cathartic and gleeful – a zany confection that could only have come from this unpredictable, unique writer.’
— Claire Lowdon, Times Literary Supplement

Review quote:

‘Deft and disturbing…. In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s crisp translation, Tokarczuk tells a folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone … elegant and genuinely unsettling.’
— Hari Kunzru, New York Times

Review quote:

‘The book challenges you to think while still being slyly funny … [and] there’s also a compelling plot to pull us along…. There are three plot-twisting surprises, one that I guessed early on, one I was wrong about and one that floored me. Tokarczuk is a writer of definite views, many of which I disagree with, but this is clever, intelligent stuff, touched with genius.’
— David Mills, The Times

Review quote:

‘The Nobel Prize-winning novelist is exceptionally adept at blending the high-minded sanctimoniousness of the sanatorium with the ever-present threat and legacy of violence…. Tokarczuk’s outstanding novel is a striking reaffirmation of literature’s genius for nuance in a world da