THE EMPUSIUM : A HEALTH RESORT HORROR STORY by Olga Tokarcsuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) – Riverhead Books, 2024
The Empusium is the story of sick men bad-mouthing women.
The main title is an invented portmanteau linking together two Greek words: symposium (a drink-fuelled philosophical debate) and empusa (a female shape-shifter).
If, from the book’s subtitle, you are tempted to visualize crazed serial killers or scary monsters , change the thought. There is one mysterious death near the beginning but little that could be conventionally defined as a ‘horror story’.
In an interview with Literary Hub, Tokarcsuk says “the choice of the horror genre makes sense because the main theme of this book is essentially a horror story—of patriarchal horror, protracted in historical time, embedded within culture, with all its traditional features, such as rivalry, a black-and-white, binary view of the world, and misogyny.”
I wish I had known this before starting the novel. It might have made my reading experience less of a slog.
This is not a plot-driven story. It is slow, repetitive and frankly often rather dull. I suppose the prose is intended to replicate the tedium of the prescribed routines in a health resort but I can’t help feeling it could have been edited down and/or spiced up substantially.
Any ‘terror’ is therefore man-made and derives entirely from the hideous views expressed by the health resort patients. The degree of misogyny is profound and their warped opinions go unchallenged. Women are seen as volatile, fickle and entirely dependent on the “sphere of men”. They are called siblings of frogs and devils and one man declares confidently: “We cannot regard the act of a woman as entirely conscious”.
The protagonist Wojniez has no experience with the opposite sex and no distinct sexual identity. He has been raised in fear of his oppressive father and his inner life is equated to “an invisible piece of luggage what we drag after us all our lives.”
The novel’s existential themes have been compared to Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ (1924) which is set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps with a predominantly male cast of characters. Olga Tokarcsuk acknowledges the accuracy of this comparison but her perspective is different from Mann’s in that she wants to draw attention to how so many works of ‘classic’ fiction feature men discussing serious matters while women are confined to the background in the service of the patriarchy. The book includes a lot of quotes, paraphrases and references to literature of the late 19th and 20th centuries.
The idea of writing a feminist tract in a novel with no significant female characters is an ingenious one but demands a lot of patience on the part of the reader. I imagine a second reading would help to understand the full structure and scope of the novel but I doubt I will ever test this theory.
