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Mysteries and misogyny: The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk, reviewed

Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain in this ‘health resort horror story’ set in a Silesian guesthouse on the eve of the first world war

21 September 2024

9:00 AM

21 September 2024

9:00 AM

The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Fitzcarraldo Editions, pp.336, 12.99

Nothing is ever quite as it seems in the world of Olga Tokarczuk. Her latest novel starts with an epigraph taken from Fernando Pessoa: ‘The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.’ Wild deer were murder suspects in her surreal and beautiful 2018 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

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