Horror junkie is smitten with spa thriller

STARTING with an admission: I haven't been in love with a book for a long time. I sit with my friend, the retired architecture professor, for refreshments at Labotessa in Cape Town's CBD, as the new year rumbles in relentlessly. I confess to my dear friend that I'd quietly fallen for Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story during the holidays. I mention that the inspiration for the novel and therefore the primary intertext is Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg / The Magic Mountain. My friend tells me when he was arrested by the apartheid police at the Lesotho border in the dark 1960s, it was because he had a copy of the German classic in his car's trunk. Now I'm madly in love with The Empusium.

My best friend, who years ago successfully tried his hand at an Afrikaans novel and knows much more about the ins and outs of literature than I do, is sceptical: Thomas Mann a hundred years later in the world of 2025? How can something like that work out? I remind him how much he liked Colm Tóibín's poignant, incomparable recent novel about Mann, The Magician, and of Tokarczuk's International Booker-winning Flights (which I was less fond of – too baroque). He says okay, he's going to give The Empusium a chance.

Not just a short-lived holiday fling

Meanwhile, my infatuation intensifies – I realise it's not just a girl interrupted short-lived holiday fling; it's serious business. I decide to proclaim my hopeless condition to the world on Instagram and Facebook. Afrikaans writer Eben Venter lets it be known on Insta that he also liked the book and he even uses the word “love", but says the dogged repetition of misogyny, via the voices of the group of male characters who dominate the entire book from beginning to near the end, ultimately bored him and that the ending (“denouement" is his word) didn't quite work for him.

When I informed another friend, the renowned Afrikaans novelist, that The Empusium reminded me of her writing in terms of the staggering scale of imagination present and the idiosyncratic, often hilarious, statements in the text, she sufficed with the view that it was “really a strange novel" for her – and that is, in summary, perhaps the very point.

On Facebook, I then ventured, alas, to relate my new agalma (as the Greeks would call it) to the troubling, toxic, dangerous current political situations and positions. I write about The Empusium's critique of the mutually exclusive binary opposites (such as “man" and “woman") to which our collective and individual consciousness and also our languages are irretrievably addicted, into which our micro and macro politics on both right- and left-leaning sides, and in ever-increasing polarisation, are now declining. I write that in the mainstream it feels as if the tradition of nearly 80 years of intellectual questioning of identity politics simply hasn't happened – “I imagine Judith Butler in Berkeley, tearing her hair out.”

A psalm for complexity

I say I'm in love with The Empusium because it's nothing less than a brilliant, subtle literary plea (by a Nobel laureate, to boot) for the revival of the history of thought around the critique of identity. And we are at an increasingly defining geopolitical moment (Trump 2.0). In this respect, it is a psalm for complexity, for the multiplicity that Hannah Arendt boldly called the “law of the Earth", for the one with, not above, the Other.

A tireless commenter who obviously hasn't read the book, complains that my sentences about The Empusium on Facebook are “too long and self-engaged" and that I was certainly “driven" to do so by the book I'm describing. Ah, well. Maybe she's right, but not in the way she intended: After all, falling in love is as much a self-involved state as it is a state of involvement with the other, boundaries blurring, tight distinctions blurring, sentences getting long.

I'll admit that I didn't really understand the fuss surrounding Tokarczuk and her conquest of the Nobel Prize until I read The Empusium. As I said, Flights was too much for me and although Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is on my list of top five books of all time in terms of pure reading pleasure, one looks for something more when estimating Nobel quality, something unique and lasting amid all so much multiplicity and transience. That singularity, that enduring quality, I found in The Empusium. I now understand. Tokarczuk's monumental The Books of Jacob is waiting on my shelf.

Queer as I am, I so want to share my loved one with other readers, and at the same time keep it for myself. Thus I will simply suffice with a revelation and a concealment.

Pagan rituals in a forest

As for disclosure, a quick explanation of the title in the hope that it will further pique the interest of others in my beloved: In Aristophanes' The Frogs, in a dialogue between Dionysius and Xanthia reference is made to the mythological female devil or demon – the shape-shifting uberwitch Empusa. The empusium is Empusa's domain and in the novel this domain is equated with the dark forests that surround the small Silesian village Görbersdorf, in which the events of 1913 take place and the ever-present sanatorium is located.

According to village legend, one day, due to real witch hunts by the men, the women had to pack up their belongings and leave behind all their oppressive small-town household obligations to spread into these forests in order to survive. There they learn all sorts of sinister pagan rituals, whereby they acquire violent powers to cruelly tear apart once a year, at the given seasonal moment, any native of the village – sanatorium patient or not – who ventures into the forest. Then they would scatter the broken, bloody body parts far and wide through the forest (the details of the legend are more complex than I have room to disclose here ).

The cover-up? Well, I haven't revealed anything about the main character, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz (a deliberate tongue twister) yet. Let's just say that in the course of the novel he becomes both sick and healthy, or fundamentally undermines the distinction between sick and healthy, as it applies to them (as opposed to her or him). I think, by the way, that Tokarczuk cannot be immediately branded as a relativistic nihilist because of the nature and actions of her main character. Rather, she is a kind of hefty literary scout of the underbelly of the supposedly humanistic value system that we take for granted so smugly.

Nor did I elaborate on the literary and philosophical victims at Tokarczuk's hand. There are, whether we like it or not, both kinds – and they are famous more than infamous, though Tokarczuk makes a strong case in a nuanced manner that perhaps the situation ought to be the other way around, or that all the celebrity ought at least to be supplemented by notoriety, for the record's sake.

As light-footed as Cheslin Kolbe ...

This kind of aggregation, conspiracy, juxtaposition, of opposites is already seen in the book's subtitle: A Health Resort Horror Story.

I've always been somewhat of a horror junkie (I watch all the Alien movies at least once a year, admittedly with headphones on because my spouse complains about the deafening screams and inevitable gnashing of teeth). And now my fate is sealed, because I'm head over heels in love with Tokarczuk's horror story that sidesteps the punctured trope of “tragedy" as light-footed as Cheslin Kolbe into the “denouement" and in the process becomes (something) quite different.

The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and costs R691 at Amazon SA. 

♦ VWB ♦

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