Subtitled A Health Resort Horror Story, the novel is set in a sanatorium in the Silesian settlement of Görbersdorf on the eve of World War I.
It has been described by Tokarczuk as a retelling of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In her novel, the main protagonist, Mieczysław Wojnicz, is a young engineer who arrives at the sanatorium with a mild case of tuberculosis.
But, as The New York Times Book Review writes in its note: "... disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone or something seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target."
Tokarczuk’s The Empusium has been published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in Britain in a translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
In previous years, Fitzcarraldo published Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, also in a translation by Lloyd-Jones, and The Books of Jacob, translated by Jennifer Croft.
Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life."
(mk/gs)