The Empusium review: ‘hooch and misogyny at a gentlemen’s guesthouse’

It is six years since Olga Tokarcuk succeeded in winning the Man Booker and the Nobel awards for her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. Since then, The Emposium has apparently been in gestation to emerge as part homage, part critique, of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, first published a century ago.

The titular Empusium is a Silesian “Guesthouse for Gentlemen” where Mieczysław Wojnicz, an engineering student reminiscent of Mann’s Hans Castorp, is undergoing treatment for tuberculosis, a disease then responsible for 25 per cent of all adult deaths in Europe. He is presented as an everyman from Lviv, a Ukranian city with a substantial Jewish population, although he is not identified as Jewish.

So far so unexceptional. Wojnicz resembles my own relatives, also from Lviv, and who were regularly prescribed a stay in what was then called a Kurhaus or Spa, where taking the waters and conversations with fellow residents absorbed much of a potentially boring enforced stay.

This Empusium, however, is a very different place to the commonplace Spa. Its prototype is a mythological figure, originating not in western Silesia but in ancient Greece, a shape-shifting female with a single copper leg, under the command of head witch Hecate who seeks to seduce and then suck the blood of innocent youths. And it connects to Tokarczuk’s established fascination with the arcane and primeval, here in the folk traditions regarding the primeval Tüntschi forest dwellers and their rituals to provide the grisly climax to this “Horror Story”.

Under the influence of self-prescribed doses of a local hooch known as Schwärmerei – a term once applied to café philosophers by philosopher Oswald Spengler – the residents vituperatively debate women’s deceptions and failings, with arguments turning on whether the first mention of witches lies in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass or Aristophanes’ The Frogs. Herr August, a Viennese classical philologist, helpfully re-enacts the latter, assuming each successive character’s voice until they resemble their audience. Small wonder that the all-male Empusium reveals itself as a hothouse of pernicious misogyny.

At this point it might be worth suggesting that reader consider reading from the end rather than the start of The Empusium. Following a misty photograph of what may have been the Empusium nestled among pinewoods in a mountainous cleft is a list of place names. Göbersdorf is listed beside Sokolowsko, Lwów beside Lviv and so forth, each as it appears in the text then under its present name, as if to underline how close fiction and actuality can be. Or, perhaps, how reality alters as history intervenes, and what were integral to the Austro-Hungarian empire are now fragments of a wider terrain, each in its own idiom.

A final author’s note declares that: “All the misogynistic views on the topic of women and their place in the world are paraphrased from texts by the following authors.” They range from Augustine of Hippo to WB Yeats by way of Shakespeare and Sartre. Bearing this subtext in mind diminishes the power of a work that only intermittently touches the allusive flights of fantasy of Tokarczuk’s earlier novels and too often reduces to the merely didactic.

Demonstrating the breadth of male misogyny across the widest spectrum of authorship diminishes both their meaningful literary prowess and her own.

Like some of the male authors she indicts, Tokarczuk falls under the spell of verbosity: her strength can too easily become her weakness. Where Tokarczuk’s inventive imagination and historical creativity are given full rein, The Emposium touches the heights of her Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. When it becomes the literary equivalent of train-spotting – which member of William Opitz’s Gentlemen’s Guesthouse, inebriated with Schwärmerei, represents which stage of misogyny in the political history of nations? – it fails. A book of captivating literary interludes that never quite match Tokarczuk’s previous literary achievements.