Has Olga Tokarczuk Been Struck by the Nobel Curse?
With its million-dollar purse and instant prestige, the Nobel Prize in Literature can secure or even revive a literary career. Yet the prominence from such an award applies a pressure that many writers cannot withstand. After his 1968 win, Yasunari Kawabata abandoned a serialized novel and never published another piece of writing in his lifetime. Others feel the pull of public affairs, deploying their newfound power in support of both domestic and international causes and turning their literature into activism.
Such seems to be the case for Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize in 2018. Beginning with the 2007 publication of her Man Booker International Prize–winning novel, Flights, she has fallen into a rhythm, following each mystically inclined, formally challenging work with a light genre riff more focused on dictating a salient political message than pushing the bounds of art or reality. Unfortunately, her newest novel, The Empusium, only amplifies this pattern.
Published in Poland in 2022, and translated this year by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the book opens in mid-September 1913. Mieczysław Wojnicz, a young Polish engineer in training, has arrived at the sanatorium in Göbersdorf, a resort town in the Silesian mountains near the current Polish-Czech border. Wojnicz is a delicate, sensitive man, with an “exaggerated fear of being spied on” and an uncomfortable relationship with his father, and he has come to the sanatorium to cure his tuberculosis. Standing atop an underground lake, Göbersdorf’s air is simply better than elsewhere, a natural cure in which treatment becomes inseparable from life. “Merely breathing will stop the process of decay in your lungs,” explains his doctor. “Every breath is curative.”
Göbersdorf is a popular destination with patients from across Austro-Hungary and further afield. So popular, in fact, that he cannot yet get a room at the sanatorium. Instead, he lodges at the Gästehaus für Herren, a small, damp establishment run by a gruff local and his strange, slightly animalistic servant. His fellow guests are also patients, including Longin Lukas, a Catholic traditionalist from Prussia, the Viennese scholar and socialist August August, and Thilo, a fey, morose art student from Berlin who is perpetually on the brink of death. Together, these men eat, drink, and talk, while attempting to gloss over the death already inside their bodies.
The Empusium is clearly in conversation with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, another tale of a young man who arrives at a mountain sanatorium where, through his participation in a series of philosophical conversations, scientific observations, and occult experiences, he comes to a form of self-knowledge. Tokarczuk’s book is also full of conversations — arguments, really — without beginning or end, in which the humanistic August and the authoritarian Lukas duke it out over questions of nationalism, democracy, race, and art. Yet there is something pointedly off about these dialogues. Unlike the figures in The Magic Mountain, whose opposing viewpoints are substantive and supply the young Hans Castorp with viable interpretations of reality, Tokarczuk’s characters lecture; they speak in bromides, and their conversations never build, develop, or resolve. In fact, in this place of supposed healing, Wojnicz begins to notice a certain strange dissipation, as if no one were actually getting better at all.
The reader will have guessed this long before our humble protagonist. In English, the book is subtitled A Health Resort Horror Story, and Tokarczuk works hard to insinuate an undercurrent of dread through all the proceedings. From the first pages, she hints at a secondary, mystic reality just beneath the surface of our own. Wojnicz’s sequences are narrated in a standard past-tense third-person, rarely straying from his thoughts and memories. Yet every so often, the prose will switch into a slippery, present-tense collective voice, a “we” that can slide through walls and floors, peer into sick lungs, and feel the pulsing of the natural world. This is the voice of the Tüntschi, a mysterious forest-dwelling force that seems to exist outside time. In these moments, the novel’s otherwise dull prose style becomes supple and slippery, expanding the reader’s vision beyond the tiny, cloistered world of its characters and embracing the potential of fiction to alter a viewer’s vision of the world. It resembles the liberatory moment in Tokarczuk’s 2013 Books of Jacob (translated by Jennifer Croft), when the dying Yente swallows a spell and her soul flies off through the night, part of that wind that is really “the vision of the dead.” In changing her perspective, the old woman has liberated herself of body, sex, nationality. “Yente’s vision knows no such borders, after all.”
This collective voice irregularly erupts into The Empusium, to remind the reader that much more is going on than initially seems. And in Göbersdorf, threats certainly loom. Centuries before, the region was the site of horrible witch hunts; many women were said to have fled into the forests and never returned. Wandering those woods with his companions, Wojnicz comes upon soot-faced charcoal burners, near-wild men who mock the genteel patients and copulate with feminine dolls sculpted from the materials of the forest floor. And as Thilo discovers at the cemetery, one man from the village dies every November.
Horror stories are often about the disjuncture between appearances and depths and turn on a change in perception: the genteel aristocrat who is in fact a monster, the idyllic town that conceals a dark secret. Using the tools of the novel, Tokarczuk is trying to lead us to an understanding of the horror at the basis of European culture. The residents of the guesthouse consume Schwämerei, a local liquor distilled from mushrooms with ostensibly hallucinogenic qualities. Those hoping this will unlock the author’s mystic side will be disappointed; its effect is much more convenient. The drink spurs the characters to talk, and it allows Wojnicz to sense those strange voices whispering at the periphery of consciousness. It grants him an (irritatingly rare) insight: “Wojnicz had noticed that every discussion … eventually led to women.”
Many of the characters, including Lukas and August, have a lot to say about women. Women are weak; too close to nature; at an earlier stage of evolution; overcome by their emotions; of low morals. They cannot raise children, or understand real art, or think deeply about anything at all.
More so than race, nation, culture, or politics, misogyny is at the core of all their beliefs. This gives the novel’s endless conversations a deadly flat quality because the ideas in question are not meant to be substantive. They are feints, leading us back to a fundamental misogyny. The arguments feel cobbled together from external sources because they are: In her author’s note, Tokarczuk attributes “all the misogynistic views on the topic of women” to past authors as diverse as Augustine, Darwin, Ovid, Pound, Wagner, Freud, Plato, and Jack Kerouac. That last one is key. Rather than an interrogation of the beliefs of particular people at a particular place and time, Tokarczuk’s novel presents an undifferentiated compendium of eternal misogyny.
Thomas Mann began work on The Magic Mountain in 1912 with the intention of writing, as he put it in a 1915 letter, “a story with basic pedagogic-political intentions.” Mann spent the following years cheering on the German war effort and fighting with his brother, the left-wing novelist Heinrich, in the press. Yet Mann’s initially conservative views changed with the world, and by the time he published the novel in 1924, the supposedly simple, straightforward story had become a long, ambivalent work.
Even before his Nobel win in 1929, Mann was the most prominent German novelist of his era. So too is Tokarczuk in contemporary Poland. She has placed herself in direct opposition to reactionary currents in Polish politics and culture, writing against those who scapegoat “the so-called crazy leftists, queer-lovers, Germans, Jews, European Union puppets, feminists, liberals and anyone who supports immigrants.” Using her Nobel money, she set up the Olga Tokarczuk Foundation to support the arts and human rights in Poland and abroad.
Despite its historical setting, it is impossible to extract The Empusium from this context. The novel was written during the majority rule of the right-wing Law and Justice Party and published before a center-left coalition pushed L&J out of power in 2023. Like her 2009 murder mystery, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, it attacks contemporary political problems through the lens of genre fiction. These novels transform Tokarczuk’s enemies into a set of significant types — intellectuals, priests, doctors, fur farmers — and then begins to pick them off.
Yet there is no real mystery in Plow: Tokarczuk presents her doddering old narrator as an essentially righteous avenger, cutting down those despoilers of the earth whom the vegetarian author abhors. The Empusium similarly crams potentially interesting ideas inside the straitjacket of a basic horror plot. Whatever her attraction to genre material, Tokarczuk does not write gripping narratives, and her new one jerks irregularly along, introducing plot threads — the voices, the dead men, the strange chair in the guesthouse’s attic, then dropping them, sometimes for hundreds of pages, so that we can listen to more philosophizing. Again and again, Wojnicz will find himself compelled by something strange, or even frightening, only to abruptly pull back, drawing Tokarczuk’s conceit thinner and thinner until you can only see the seams of what she is teaching you.
Yet the best word to describe Empusium would not be horror but fear: not the reader’s, or any character’s, but the author’s. Tokarczuk seems desperately afraid that you not miss the point of her book or take away the wrong lesson. Philosophical ideas are presented only in their bluntest, most outrageous form because she can’t risk allowing the reader to believe them. She finds their misogyny odious, and so you must, too. Rather than learning from the novel, it ends up instructing you. So, too, the characterizations, which dictate exactly how we are meant to respond.
No one frightens her more than Wojnicz. In Illness As Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes that tuberculosis was believed to purify those who suffered from it. TB was the illness of innocents: “The virtuous only become more so as they slide toward death.” The Polish student reads as a parody of this tendency. Shy and naïve, he has nothing to contribute to the arguments at the guesthouse. He does not have philosophical ideas of his own, and he does not seem to think about women much at all. Because he is ignorant, he becomes completely innocent, exempting him from their misogyny and from the reader’s scorn. Just about every memory of his father and uncle turns on the question of masculinity, how manly qualities must triumph over the pitiful feminine. “His father believed that blame for both national disasters and educational failures lay with a soft upbringing that encouraged girlishness, mawkishness and passivity.” These memories arise instructively, pre-interpreted, with no space for the reader to reflect or respond.
There is a deeper explanation for this, which, in a crass, regressive move, the author waits a full 236 pages to reveal, and even then only via a leering, Crying Game–style focus on his genitalia. Though described and perceived as male (and gendered as such in the narration, hence my persistent use of his), Wojnicz is in fact intersex, with both penis and uterus, a much more serious medical problem, in his father’s view, than his TB. This revelation reframes much of the earlier novel, from his paranoia to his discomfort in stiff formal clothing to his father’s obsession with manliness. Yet this does not deepen our understanding of Wojnicz, only replacing it with another justification for his essential innocence. He exists for her as a purely symbolic creature, real only in what he signifies. As Wojnicz’s doctor explains in a long speech late in the novel, “You will be a clear reminder that the vision of the world as black and white is a false and destructive vision … You treat us to a land ‘in between,’ which we’d rather not think about.”
This unintentionally describes the novel’s treatment of Wojnicz. His middleness becomes a muddle. At no point does she allow him to have flaws, to hate, to hurt others, be mistaken — be human. You sense her always protecting him from culture, time, environment, guiding him away from saying or doing anything that might impugn him in the eyes of the reader. Tokarczuk cannot even risk having Wojnicz view himself negatively after all those years of observation and persecution. “Well, he was as he was,” she writes during the big reveal. “He couldn’t help it. He thought of himself as normal.” A born victim, he remains eternally innocent.
It is a good, pure-hearted choice, an attempt to refute her right-wing critics and affirm the marginalized people they attack. An intersex person like Wojnicz is nothing more than an idea, a symbol to these people. Yet in trying to oppose these bigots, she capitulates to them, orienting her novel as an inversion of their beliefs, rather than using it to express the messy, ambiguous, disappointing truth of life. Even if she is writing against them, she is still writing on their terms, and her book ends up feeling cramped and small.
A work of literature is at bottom a mechanism for the generation of meaning. The author brings the material and shapes it into a desired form. We bring ourselves to the work, make connections, read other works, allow our thoughts to spiral off into unexpected places. This is how an artwork continues to live. But in order to do so, space must be made for the reader to make their own associations and draw their own conclusions. Irony, ambiguity, ambivalence: all create a chance for misunderstanding. But they also create the necessary gap between author and reader that creates the space for meaning.
In her best work, Tokarczuk has created that gap through voice and form. Jacob convincingly resurrects a dead world of magic and superstition through confidence and humor; the fragmented structure of Flights enlists the reader in its reconstruction. When it heeds the call of the Tüntschi, The Empusium approaches those earlier heights. But for the most part, she has settled on something much closer to Mann’s original “story with basic pedagogic-political intentions” than the great novel he ended up writing. The novel might end with a moment of possibility, with Wojnicz embracing the possibility of his own multiplicity, of deploying appearances to transcend them. But The Empusium is rarely more than it appears and frequently much less.
VULTURE book review
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