Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, a student from Lviv arrived at a mountain sanatorium in Lower Silesia, hoping to be cured of tuberculosis. Here he met a group of similarly ill people, with whom he argued about politics, mysticism or literature. Does this sound familiar? Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuková revised one of the world’s most famous novels, Thomas Mann’s Magic Hill – and she did it intelligently, respectfully and at the same time critically.

The novel Empusion is the first book Tokarczuková published after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018. The committee highlighted her “narrative imagination, which depicts with encyclopedic passion the crossing of borders as a form of life.” All of the above also appears in the latest novel. The suspicion that this sanatorium will not be “normal” has become stronger since the strange death of the owner’s wife occurred. This feeling of danger was then exacerbated by the information that every year one young man died in the city.

The novel is described in the annotation as “naturally healing horror” and Tokarczuková is absolutely convincing in establishing an unsettling atmosphere. As a group of men sit and have endless conversations, something changes and forms around them. However, debaters are too busy with their amazing ideas to have time to worry about the world around them.

Among the patients there were people from different parts of Europe who held different points of view – a Catholic, socialist or theosophist was treated here. However, in their conversation, they came to a general conclusion very quickly, but it was not the result of a truly in-depth discussion; the patient seems too comfortable to try such a thing. Local liquor Schwärmerei is also partly to blame, so patients get something else than they expect…

In the novel Empusion, women do not speak, but they are talked about very often. Men who love to argue depict them as inferior, frivolous, and incapable of more basic intellectual actions. Some passages are particularly interesting in this regard:

“‘When it comes to literary genius, my friends,’ August continued his theme, ‘the surest sign that a work is good is that it does not appeal to women.'” Or, for example: “Women are interested in literature.” Dangerous literature touches on interpersonal relationships, more precisely relationships between men and women (…) focusing on emotional and physical exchanges. They always describe the dresses and wallpaper patterns in detail. They have a soft spot for the lower classes and often feel sorry for animals. They are often attracted to all kinds of oddities: ghosts, dreams, and apparitions, but also the interplay of circumstances and other coincidences, which they use to cover up their lack of talent in constructing proper storylines.

When reading such passages, one might wonder – where does Tokarczuková, who describes herself as a feminist, get it from? However, the same writer said this in an interview for the Alarm a few years ago: “Fortunately, as a writer, I have the power to create a world where women have power. I feel strongly that there are two parallel worlds: the world that traditionally felt around us and the world of women. And often the two are not compatible at all. And it’s not just women. My feminism is based on a very simple egalitarian philosophy, in our culture, apart from women, everything else is also animals.”

Why are women not given space in his novel Empusion? And why do male heroes speak of them in such disparaging tones?

In all her misogynistic exclamations, Tokarczuková paraphrases the texts of world-famous authors whose books are part of the world literary canon – from Sigmund Freud to Jack Kerouac to Arthur Schopenhauer.

Some of the selected passages are humorous not only because of their undisguised superiority and intolerance, but also because they may have something to do with Tokarczuková’s own writing. So when one of the characters is irritated by the amount of attention female writers pay to clothing, one cannot help but recall the detailed descriptions of the patients in the novel Empusion, when Tokarczuková writes specifically about their shoes. The complaint against wallpaper may in turn remind us of one of the most famous feminist short stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. The story is about a woman who is locked in a room with yellow wallpaper. The absence of intellectual activity leads to the fact that the woman just concentrates on the wallpaper until she starts to lose her mind…

All the passages in Empusion’s novel, where Tokarzczuk’s heroes lean on women, look as if the Nobel laureate was vilifying the patriarchal view of literature with gusto. But the author goes further in the novel than this effective but still one-dimensional joke: An important part of the structure is who is watching whom.

During the reading, it gradually becomes clear that the narrator’s speaking in the first person plural in the present tense (“Then we will see the paving of the platform…”) is not simply a nod to a more traditional form of narration; behind “us” there are other people hiding. And this is where the name of the novel Empusion, taken from the name Empúsa – an ancient Greek demonic character who could change shape – becomes important. Thanks to this, this episode makes it even clearer that the people who speak out – no matter how loudly they admit it – are not and never have been the main movers of events.

The novel Empusion can be read as a dialogue with canonical works, as a lament on the difficulty of discussions in which the participants are willing to really think and not just wait for them to add their observations to the topic, or attempt to point fingers. realizing that our bodies are definitely more than just human. In any case, it is clear from her reading that Tokarczuková’s work should be followed even after her work has become a definitive part of the canon she loves to describe.

The Polish writer was clearly least interested in literature because of its own deification and immersion in a monument.