Nobel Prize for Literature | Ep. 01 | Olga Tokarczuk (Nobel Prize 2018): Empusium (2022)

In this new series I will present books written by authors who were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In the first episode I present a novel written by Olga Tokarczuk:
Empusium - A health resort horror story.

The polish original Empuzjon was published in 2022, the English translation in September 2024.

This novel is undeniably an independent and highly original work, but it is also an homage to Thomas Mann's novel "The Magic Mountain".

In the first part of the video I take a look at the novel as an independent, stand-alone piece of literature, without talking about any of the references to The Magic Mountain; but the second part of the video is focussed on precisely these connections between the two novels. So depending on your interest, you can select the part of the video that interests you most (time stamps are given in the info box).
Because of this double-nature of the video, I have uploaded it also to my secondary channel "Thomas Mann Project", which is dedicated to a long-term close reading of The Magic Mountain, but where I also like to present books that are strongly related to the Magic Mountain.

Key elements of the plot:
In September 1913, a young Polish student from Lviv, Mieczysław Wojnicz, begins a stay at the health resort for lung patients in the Silesian spa town of Görbersdorf. Mieczyslaw had to interrupt his engineering studies in sewer construction due to his failing health. He lives in a so-called guest house for gentlemen run by a Mr. Wilhelm Opitz. The town of Görbersdorf essentially lives from its reputation as a health resort, hence guest houses for the less well-off patients also make up a large part of the town. The local economy profits largely from the health spa activities and therefore strives to avoid or suppress anything that could jeopardize its good reputation.

Mieczyslaw Wojnicz is not the only guest in Mr. Opitz's guest house, there is a whole squad of variously bizarre and gentlemen. Mieczyslaw is a rather sensitive, reserved and shy young man who finds it difficult to adjust to this new environment. It certainly doesn't help that there is a violent death in the guest house on the very first day of his stay: Mr. Opitz's wife is found hanged. So it's a somewhat unsettling and mysterious start, and Olga Tokarczuk works nicely with the means of subtle horror quite early on. On the surface, however, the appearance of an intact world or at least an intact village is still maintained - there is a lively social life for this small group of gentlemen in the Opitz house, they not only meet at mealtimes, but also go on short excursions together to some natural attractions and vista points in the surrounding area, but above all they sit together in the evening in a convivial atmosphere, buoyed (boyed) up by a strangely aromatic herbal liqueur nicknamed "Schwärmerei", made according to Mr. Opitz's own traditional recipe, and they talk politics, philosophy, religion. But above all, they talk about women.

The characteristics, stereotypes and roles of the sex and gender, the question of what constitutes masculinity and femininity, but above all the role and value or lack of value of women from the men's point of view, these are not only the dominant topic of conversation, but they also permeate the entire plot, the atmosphere and language of the novel, sometimes overtly, sometimes subliminally.

In this atmosphere, Mieczyslaw is struggling to make up his mind about the topics discussed, but he is also struggling to come to terms with his own (sort of complicated) sexual identity.

And then there are these strange rumours about disturbing events that take place in Görbersdorf every fall, when young men disappear under unexplained circumstances, only to be found as dismembered, torn bodies in the forest...

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
2:56 The novel 'Empusium'
21:54 Parallels to 'The Magic Mountain'

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