The Empusium

Did You Know?

• The original Polish title was Empuzjon. Horror przyrodoleczniczy.
• The English translation was published in the US on 24 September 2024 and in the UK two days later.

Plot

The story is set in 1913 at Görbersdorf, a tuberculosis sanatorium in Lower Silesia created by Dr. Hermann Brehmer. Mieczysław Wojnicz, a hydraulic engineering student from Lwów, arrives on a cold September night to treat his lungs. He lodges at a guesthouse run by Wilhelm Opitz and meets other patients, including the Catholic professor Longin Lukas, the socialist August August, the art student Thilo von Hahn, and a secret police adviser. The men discuss religion, culture, politics, and the nature of women, while mysterious empousae observe them from the shadows.

Background

The Empusium shares several literary qualities with Thomas Mann's 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, including a tuberculosis sanatorium, a 1913 setting before World War I, and a young engineer protagonist. Tokarczuk has stated that The Empusium is a conscious, carefully thought-out reference to Mann's work. The Wall Street Journal described the novel as an homage and part rejoinder to The Magic Mountain, gliding from playful pastiche to feminist polemic. The Atlantic classified it as a bildungsroman, charting the growth of Mieczysław Wojnicz. The New York Journal of Books noted that the novel falls into literary suspense, woven with magical realism, disconcerting point-of-view switches involving unexplained we observers, and verb-tense changes. Dustin Illingworth in The Washington Post observed that the novel never fully commits to horror, hewing closer to a psychological thriller. Wojnicz's passages are narrated in past-tense third-person, while the we narration is first-person plural, seemingly from ghostly entities.

Reception

Bekah Waalkes of The Atlantic called The Empusium a masterful novel with a breadth of possible readings. Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal described it as an absorbing if often mystifying reading, highlighting the philosophical conflict between rationality and folk belief. Chris Power in The Guardian said Tokarczuk's riff on The Magic Mountain takes on a darkly surreal life of its own, noting a cursory feel to scene beginnings and endings and an odd, out-of-order delivery of details that gives the novel a haphazard quality.