The Empusium (2024) by Olga Tokarczuk

 Audiobook Review

The Empusium (2024)

by Olga Tokarczuk

   Like many English readers, I hadn't heard of Polish author and Nobel Prize Winner Olga Tokarczuk until the release of Flights in 2018- a translation from the original Polish which was published in 2007.  Since then I've kept up with her new English language releases- like many I found the similarities between Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, published in 2019(in English and 2008 in Polish), and Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (published in 2020). No one ever got to the bottom of it! I also read The Books of Jacob- which I thought was really great but had zero and I mean zero, commercial appeal.

  The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story arrived late last month and I quickly got the Audiobook(!) version out of the library of the Libby app.  At 11 hours it was much shorter than The Books of Jacob and more in line with the standard length of a newly published novel.   Like every book I've read of hers except for Flights, The Empusium is going to appeal to a limited audience, fans of cheeky, feminist historical fiction with genre elements, provided here by the promise of a "horror story" in the title.   Perhaps unsurprisingly, the horror is ever lurking and rarely front in center.  Instead, the reader/listener is treated to lengthy dialogues between the residents of a turn of the 20th century sanitarium which I believe is located in the Czech alps- or what would be a mountainous region of the Czech Republic today or maybe Austria.   

    I've actually learned a fair amount about sanitariums over the years from history and literary fiction- they played a prominent role in the settling of southern California vis a vis the dry client being ideal for sufferers of tuberculosis.  There's also the more contemporary understanding of the sanitarium as a predecessor/forerunner of the modern mental hospital/place to stash well-off people who are incapable of maintaining themselves in society- LGBT people, for example.   This sanitarium in this book makes use both of the tuberculosis model and the developing "science" of psychiatry- which- you don't have to be a Scientologist to point out issues with psychiatry. 

    So personally, I quite enjoyed it but it's another work of literary fiction which will have little, if any appeal to people who aren't already interested in fiction about turn of the century European sanitarium culture. Those showing up for the horror story will be left wanting.