The Empusium

The Empusium is the newest novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer Olga Tokarczuk. The title is a neologism combining Empusa, a shape-shifting woman from Greek myth, and ‘symposium’, where men gather to drink and revel in lively discussion, occasions which are plentiful in this novel.

Described as a health resort horror story, this novel conjures thoughts of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, as Tokarczuk deconstructs and riffs on the 1924 classic. The Empusium is set in 1913 and centres on Mieczysław Wojnicz. Wide-eyed and sick with tuberculosis, he retreats to the mountains to a dwelling adjacent to the sanatorium known as The Guesthouse for Gentlemen, where he meets the other sickly yet pompous residents. They partake of a mysterious, hallucinogenic liqueur and discuss all the most important questions of the day: What is the fifth dimension? Is the Mona Lisa a worthy work of art? Is a woman’s brain really smaller than a man’s? Despite the rows these men get into due to their differing ideologies, they are always able to understand and relate to each other and themselves through their shared core belief in the inferiority of women.

Tokarczuk’s representation of these deeply misogynistic men is equally unbearable and hilarious, simply because of the sheer ridiculousness of their opinions, which Tokarczuk notes she has paraphrased from many male writers across time from Nietzsche to Burroughs. While the horrors inside the guesthouse are clear, the ones outside are less so. Something frightening and seemingly intangible lurks in the surrounding mountains, watching their movements and deciding their fates. Wojnicz will not only unravel questions about the sanatorium and the world around him, but also his own inner life and being.

A suspenseful and comedic feminist parable, The Empusium is concerned with the lengths to which we go to shield ourselves from certain truths about the world, and the consequences when those truths inevitably rear their heads.