The Empusium
A Health Resort Horror Story
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The Nobel Prize-winner’s latest work is a riveting, humorous tale of mystery that takes misogyny to task. In September 1913, Mieczysław, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: will there be war? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?
But disturbing events are happening in the guesthouse and its surroundings. Someone—or something—seems to be infiltrating their world. As our student attempts to decipher the sinister forces at work, little does he realise they have already chosen their next target.
As in her acclaimed novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Tokarczuk blends horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.
Olga Tokarczuk is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize, for her novel Flights. She has received many other honours, including her country Poland’s highest literary award, the Nike, for both Flights and The Books of Jacob. Her novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was also highly praised. She is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, a children’s book and two collections of essays. Her work has been translated into more than fifty languages. Widely regarded as one of the most important writers of her generation, she lives in Poland.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.
‘A magnificent writer.’ Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 2015
‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.’ Economist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk (The Books of Jacob) delivers the disarming tale of a Silesian tuberculosis ward and a series of mysterious deaths in the surrounding countryside. Mieczysław Wojnicz, a frail engineering student, has been sent to the ward in 1913 to convalesce. While awaiting a room in the main facility, he chats in the guesthouse with a group of fellow patients, whose misogynistic views reflect the period's prevailing attitudes. Tokarczuk places the modern institution against a rural backdrop where locals remain enthralled by ancient folk superstitions, and she explores this dissonance as Wojnicz learns of the witch trials that purportedly drove some women into the wilderness centuries earlier and gave rise to legends of female shape-shifters. Each November, the bodies of mutilated men are recovered from the woods, and hikers stumble upon Tuntschi, female dolls fashioned from natural materials to gratify sex-starved itinerant laborers. At the novel's crisis point, Wojnicz uncovers a chilling connection between the legend and the sanatorium. Tokarczuk concocts a potent blend of horror tropes and literary references (Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann) as she realizes the potential of her tale's uncommon setting—a community set apart by the omnipresence of sickness and death, where the rules of civilized propriety give way to more fantastic possibilities. Readers will find much to savor.
