In 1913, a young, but pale and unhealthy Mieczyslaw Wojnicz arrives at a health resort in the quaint and brooding Silesian Mountain village of Görbersdorf (currently known as Sokołowsko in Poland). Suffering from tuberculosis, Wojnicz hopes to be treated and cured in a massive sanatorium abutting the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, where the young lad checks into, courtesy arrangements made by his well-heeled father. The prosaic establishment is managed by Wilhelm Opitz, a reserved Swiss national and his young help, Raimund.
Four other patients call the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a temporary home. Longin Lukas, a Catholic traditionalist, August August, a humanist, philologist & writer, Walter Frommer, a theosophist, and Thilo bon Hahn, a student of the Beaux-Arts. Over liberal swigs of an exotic liqueur harbouring hallucinogenic properties named Schwarmerei, the four gentlemen regale a naïve Wojnicz with deliberations and debates spanning eclectic topics. To Wojnicz’ s surprise and to a milder extent, chagrin, a pernicious and an almost inveterate degree of misogynism permeates every pore of the quartet.
Wojnicz is jolted out of his senses when he spots a dead woman in the Guesthouse for Gentlemen one evening. Opitz, in an astonishingly matter of fact manner reveals the deceased woman to be his wife, and the cause of the tragedy, an inexplicable act of suicide. Things become frighteningly murkier when Thilo confronts Wojnicz and confides in the latter, a monstrous secret plaguing the Görbersdorf landscape. Every year, around the first full moon in November, a man is found torn to pieces in the dark forest. This incident is an inevitability and an almost accepted facet of the village.
Numbed by both naivete, copious quantities of Schwarmerei and positively unpleasant local ‘delicacies’ such as dishes having parasitic ribbon worms as their primary ingredient, Wojnicz, shuffles through his days commuting between the sanatorium and his lodging. Wojnicz’ s worst fears come to a head, when on a relaxing trip to the mountains he comes face to face with ‘Tuntschi’ – garish puppet “made of moss, sticks, dry pine needles, and rotten wood, overgrown with a fine layer of mushroom spawn. The head, quite deftly made spherical, had a face formed from a bracket fungus, with pinecones driven into it for eyes…The figure’s arms and legs were thrown to the sides, and between the legs – instantly attracting an onlooker’s attention – was a dark narrow hole, a tunnel into the depths of this organic forest body.”
Opitz elucidates that the Tuntschi is the work of charcoal burners, forest dwellers who construct the puppet purely for the purpose of sexual gratification.
The Empusium, (a title derived from the word “Empusa”, a female shapeshifter in Greek Mythology) is Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, at her magical best. She weaves an exquisite tapestry whose every warp and weft lead to a fable. Fables of denial, depth and deceit. The excessive, overt and reprehensible display of masculine superiority and pretention by the men folk of Görbersdorf, might be a desperate act of either turning a blind eye or running away from the extraordinary power and potential of the feminine. Even though it is a horror story, Tokarczuk makes a capital job of juxtaposing morbid humour with eerie undertones.
But the most startling aspect of the book is the author’s note at the end. Tokarczuk elaborates on the reprehensible views of the Gentlemen in the Guesthouse when it comes to defining and debating the feminine. The fictional views are but factual paraphrases nursed by a wide swathe of male authors, ranging from Augustine of Hippo to William Butler Yeats, William Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac, and Emile Durkheim to Somerset Maugham.
The Empusium is a deeply disturbing yet intensely enlightening novel that induces awe, and introspection. Antonia Lloyd-Jones needs a special mention for her magical translation that brings the words to life.
