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Contemporary Fiction Views: A different kind of cure [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-07
As an era dies, people flock to a German village with a sanatorium and waters to ease, mayhap cure, tuberculosis. But most of them go there to die. One young man's life completely changes in Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium. The subtitle, A Health Resort Horror Story, may provide a clue.
The Empusium is a sly novel in which Mieczyslaw Wojnicz arrives in the village after leaving his Polish home. He becomes part of a male community in a boarding house. There is only one other young man there, Thilo, a young man who is clearly dying. The others are not as ill. The boarding house owner's wife, who cooks and cleans for them, kills herself within hours of Wojnicz's arrival.
That doesn't stop the men from their normal routine of walks, baths and, after dinner every evening, drinking a strangely hallucinogenic homemade liqueur and discussing metaphysical topics. One recurring topic revolves around how inferior women are to them as men, and how afraid of women they are. Because of this fear, taking away women's autonomy is important to them. From one evening's conversation:
"It won't let me stop thinking about the fact that a woman has indeed been equipped by nature with the great power of giving birth, but is entirely devoid of control over that power. Something greater mut always support her in it, some natural law, some social order, some moral code ... " "Because a woman's body belongs not only to her, but to mankind," said Lukas, a little irritated that they had not drunk a second round. "Since she gives birth, she's public property, this capacity of hers to give birth cannot be treated as her personal quality," he said ...
Sound familiar to rhetoric touted daily?
Wojnicz listens but rarely contributes to the conversations. He is more the type to not call attention to himself. He does spend time remembering occasions from his childhood. His mother died when he was very young. There was a housekeeper who showed him some affection, but she was dismissed as he grew older and his stern father wanted a more manly man of a son.
Time moves of its own accord, in moments rather than hours or days. But it is getting closer to November. Every year, that's when at least one young man dies. There are undercurrents that a presence, or presences, beyond the ken of ordinary mortals is stirred.
As he approaches death, Wojnicz's friend Thilo shows him his treasure. It's a landscape painting which, if studied closely enough and long enough, shows other objects, other colors, other realities. It's an idea that plays a role in the novel, both regarding the narrative and how Wojnicz learns to look at things.
Later in the story, Wojnicz is cautioned not to look at things, people and ideas in an either/or way. This is crucial to The Empusium. As in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, an earlier novel of her, the crucial idea is delivered in a wry and sly way, nearly mischievously but still sincerely. The translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones is superb.
Just as the characters in this 1913-set novel are about to enter a horrifying time in history, so are we, its readers. The Empusium is a good reminder that art remains essential to keeping the human spirit inspired, to not give in but to seek what is true and worthwhile.
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Today is the first new book release day of the year. A great list of today's releases, and some arriving in the months to come, was published this morning at LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025. It's a resource I use to help organize my TBR mountains.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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