‘The Empusium’ by Olga Tokarczuk    (2022) – 302 pages              Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

In ‘The Empusium’, a young man, Wojnicz, suffering from tuberculosis or consumption goes to a sanatorium in the Silesian mountains in the village of Gorbersdorf, now in Poland, hoping for a cure. The year is 1913, just before the First World War begins. The plot revolves around a group of male patients staying in a guest house in Silesia who are all being treated in the sanatorium for consumption. This happens to be the same situation as the famous German novel ‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann. At first I thought ‘The Empusium’ was going to be a wicked parody of ‘The Magic Mountain’, but Nobel prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk had something else in mind.

Soon after he arrives, our young man comes upon the guest house owner’s wife laid out on a table, dead. The guest house owner claims that she has committed suicide. The other male residents believe him, but the image of this dead woman haunts our young man throughout the novel.

All of the other men staying at this guest house while being treated are severely anti-woman. On the topic of women they all had something to say.

“Whether we like it or not, motherhood is the one and only thing that justifies the existence of this troublesome sex.”

“It’s true, the female brain is quite simply smaller, and there’s no denying it when objective research has proved it.”

Our young man has his own unresolved problems resulting from his male-dominated background. He soon realizes that “every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women.”

In the author’s note after the novel. Tokarczuk explains that all these misogynistic comments the men make are paraphrased from actual writings by male authors through the centuries including William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charles Darwin, and many other famous men.

Perhaps because these lines have been planted on to the men rather than the men saying their own words, these other male patients of the sanatorium do not really come alive as distinct individuals, rather as puppets repeating someone else’s lines. Whereas the other patients in the sanitarium in ‘The Magic Mountain’ were fascinating in their differing opinions, the male characters here all say pretty much the same misogynistic rhetoric.

Another problem is that the middle section of ‘The Empusium’ is stretched out to the extreme with not much happening. A reader gets impatient. I believe this novel could have been shortened by about a hundred pages with no loss of character development or story line.

But in the end, there is some resolution for our young man who comes to find out that he is quite different from most other men.

“Someone like you will prompt antipathy and hatred, because you will be a clear reminder that the vision of the world as black-and-white is a false and destructive vision.”

Let’s just say that the women do get their revenge.

Grade :   B-

‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’ by Olga Tokarczuk (2009) – 274 pages                                                      Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

I decided to re-post this article on this day since Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature today.

‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’ begins with alarming but fascinating stark intensity:

“We left the house and were instantly engulfed by the familiar cold, wet air that reminds us every winter that the world was not created for Mankind, and for at least half the year it shows us how very hostile it is to us. The frost brutally assailed our cheeks, and clouds of white steam came streaming from our mouths.”

The old woman who lives in a rural forest area, Janina Duszejko, and her neighbor Oddball find the newly dead body of their other neighbor Bigfoot lying on his kitchen floor. He appears to have choked to death on the bone of a deer. Nearly everyone here has a nickname. The old woman’s reaction is severe:

“I disliked him. To say I disliked him might be putting it too mildly. Instead I should say I found him repulsive, horrible. In fact I didn’t even regard him as a human Being. Now he was lying on the stained floor in his dirty underwear, small and skinny, limp and harmless…for someone as foul as he was did not deserve death. Who on earth does?”

I can think of no other novel in which the main character’s reaction to events is so fierce and sharp.

The old woman has two strong beliefs. One is a belief in astrology. There is much talk of which planet or moon is ascendant or in opposition. I usually avoid like the plague books that go too heavily into astrology, but I am happy I stuck with this one.

Her second belief is a love of and a passion for justice for animals. She absolutely detests the killing of animals, especially by hunters. Here is her justification:

“They were more human than people in every possible way. More affectionate, wiser, more joyful… And people think they can do whatever they want to Animals, as if they are just things. I think my dogs were shot by the hunters.”

She becomes livid when she finds the hunters near her home have set up salt licks to attract deer.

“And when the Animals come to feed, they shoot at them. It’s like inviting someone to dinner and murdering them.”

She is fanatic about all animals, even the lowliest:

“It occurred to me that every unjustly inflicted death deserved public exposure. Even an Insect’s. A death that nobody noticed was twice as scandalous.”

When the old woman reports cases of animal cruelty to the authorities, they see her as “a tedious madwoman who is hopeless at everything, pathetic and laughable”. However in her younger days, she worked as a bridge construction engineer and then a grade school teacher.

At one point the irate old woman tells us of the value of anger:

“Sometimes when a Person feels Anger, everything seems simple and obvious. Anger puts things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell. Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision, which is hard to attain in any other state.”

All I can say is that despite the old woman’s beliefs in things I don’t necessarily agree with, she states her views in such a clear straightforward fashion that she won me over as a fictional character.

‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’ is a powerful passionate intense novel, and I strongly recommend it.

Grade:    A

‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’ by Olga Tokarczuk (2009) – 274 pages                                                      Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’ begins with alarming but fascinating stark intensity:

“We left the house and were instantly engulfed by the familiar cold, wet air that reminds us every winter that the world was not created for Mankind, and for at least half the year it shows us how very hostile it is to us. The frost brutally assailed our cheeks, and clouds of white steam came streaming from our mouths.”

The old woman who lives in a rural forest area, Janina Duszejko, and her neighbor Oddball find the newly dead body of their other neighbor Bigfoot lying on his kitchen floor. He appears to have choked to death on the bone of a deer. Nearly everyone here has a nickname. The old woman’s reaction is severe:

“I disliked him. To say I disliked him might be putting it too mildly. Instead I should say I found him repulsive, horrible. In fact I didn’t even regard him as a human Being. Now he was lying on the stained floor in his dirty underwear, small and skinny, limp and harmless…for someone as foul as he was did not deserve death. Who on earth does?”

I can think of no other novel in which the main character’s reaction to events is so fierce and sharp.

The old woman has two strong beliefs. One is a belief in astrology. There is much talk of which planet or moon is ascendant or in opposition. I usually avoid like the plague books that go too heavily into astrology, but I am happy I stuck with this one.

Her second belief is a love of and a passion for justice for animals. She absolutely detests the killing of animals, especially by hunters. Here is her justification:

“They were more human than people in every possible way. More affectionate, wiser, more joyful… And people think they can do whatever they want to Animals, as if they are just things. I think my dogs were shot by the hunters.”

She becomes livid when she finds the hunters near her home have set up salt licks to attract deer.

“And when the Animals come to feed, they shoot at them. It’s like inviting someone to dinner and murdering them.”

She is fanatic about all animals, even the lowliest:

“It occurred to me that every unjustly inflicted death deserved public exposure. Even an Insect’s. A death that nobody noticed was twice as scandalous.”

When the old woman reports cases of animal cruelty to the authorities, they see her as “a tedious madwoman who is hopeless at everything, pathetic and laughable”. However in her younger days, she worked as a bridge construction engineer and then a grade school teacher.

At one point the irate old woman tells us of the value of anger:

“Sometimes when a Person feels Anger, everything seems simple and obvious. Anger puts things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell. Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision, which is hard to attain in any other state.”

All I can say is that despite the old woman’s beliefs in things I don’t necessarily agree with, she states her views in such a clear straightforward fashion that she won me over as a fictional character.

‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’ is a powerful passionate intense novel, and I strongly recommend it.

Grade:    A