Everything led to women

Koch’s bacillus – the cause of tuberculosis – was identified in 1882, earning the microbiologist Robert Koch the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. It was an early step on the road to the mastery of TB, which accounted for nearly 25 per cent of all European deaths during the nineteenth century. We now know that you need a complex cocktail of antibiotics to treat the disease, but in Koch’s day the prevailing wisdom was the open-air cure. The first TB sanatorium was established in 1859 by the German physician Hermann Brehmer. Brehmer’s method prescribed altitude, fresh air, exercise, plenty of fatty food and alcohol in moderation, all taken under the watchful eye of doctors and nurses at the Görbersdorf health resort in Silesia.

Known as “the romantic disease”, tuberculosis claimed some famous victims, Keats, Kafka and Orwell among them. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is surely the ultimate TB novel, a 750-page Bildungsroman begun in 1912 and finally published in 1924. Five years later Mann was awarded the Nobel prize in literature. The novel follows its young protagonist, Hans Castorp, over the course of a seven-year stay at a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. Here he encounters various older patients who while away the time with long conversations about western civilization.

Exactly 100 years after The Magic Mountain, another Nobel laureate’s subversive homage to Mann has been published in English. The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk received the Nobel prize in 2019. Two years earlier, her novel of 2007, Flights (TLS, July 28, 2017), had appeared in English translation by Jennifer Croft, winning the International Booker prize. Since then the Nobel-magnet publisher Fitzcarraldo has been bringing out her back catalogue. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (TLS, November 16, 2018), a quirky eco-thriller translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, had first appeared in Polish in 2009. The Books of Jacob (TLS, January 21, 2022), Tokarczuk’s 928-page magnum opus, arrived eight years after its original appearance in Poland, following a titanic translation project by Croft. Obscure to English- language readers for most of her thirty-year career, Tokarczuk has become increasingly well known. Her new book reaches us hot off the press, appearing in translation by Lloyd-Jones just two years after its Polish publication.

The Empusium’s protagonist is a mildly tubercular young Polish man called Mieczysław Wojnicz. The year is 1913; Europe is on the eve of war, as in The Magic Mountain. Professor Sokołowski – one of several real historical figures in this novel – has sent Wojnicz to Görbersdorf for treatment. Like Hans Castorp, Wojnicz is an engineer in training, intellectually out of his depth among the cultured residents of the resort. The reader swiftly feels affection and sympathy for the whimsical young Wojnicz, whose anxieties and childhood memories we are privy to. He has an “exaggerated fear of being spied on” (for a good reason I won’t reveal here). As a motherless child, he has suffered under his father’s well-intentioned efforts to make a man of him. Certain pleasures had to be taken in secret:

whenever he was alone and out of the reach of his father’s discipline … he would wrap his naked body in a satin tablecloth edged with a soft fringe and, feeling how blissfully it brushed against his thighs and calves, he would think how wonderful it would be if people could go about in tablecloth tunics, like the ancient Greeks.

The reference to the ancient Greeks is far from incidental. Just as Mann’s novel is infused with folklore and classical mythology, so is The Empusium. The “Empusa” of the title is a shape-shifting female referenced in Aristophanes’ play The Frogs (405 BC), which is quoted at length by a character called Herr August. (Herr August is perhaps the most likeable of the pompous older male patients who argue constantly about democracy, religion and the fate of Europe.) On the wooded hillsides surrounding the resort the charcoal-burners make “Tuntschi”, crude life-size sex dolls fashioned from moss and wood, to relieve their urges on lonely nights. The narrative voice slips between the third person focalized for Wojnicz and a chorus-like, omniscient “we”, who enter and exit in mysterious ways: “We are drawn to the cracks between the floorboards – and there we disappear”.

The Empusium is also a horror story, tricked out with all the usual ghoulish accoutrements. There is a counting song that Wojnicz keeps hearing – as a clock chime, or hummed by children, or played out of tune by a local trumpeter. There is a graveyard filled with the bodies of young men, all of whom have died in November. There is an undercover policeman among the patients. Wojnicz’s closest friend at the resort, a very sick young man called Thilo, believes that “a landscape is capable of killing a person … And it happens here too, in Görbersdorf, once a year the landscape takes its sacrifice and kills a man”.

Despite the large (if mischievous) debt to The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk makes this novel all her own with her idiosyncratic blend of registers and genres. She is both a collagist and a doodler, a freewheeling improvisator taking her narrative line for a gloriously erratic walk. In this The Empusium recalls Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which yokes a comic murder-mystery to impassioned nature writing and encomia on the work of William Blake. In Lloyd-Jones’s poised translation, Tokarczuk’s puckishness gleams brightly. The best passages in this new novel are weird, lyrical rhapsodies describing the natural world through the all-seeing eyes of those mysteriously plural narrators. They observe, for example, the myriad effects of the autumn equinox, when “the ecliptic was aligned in such a special way that it counterbalanced the vibration of the earth”:

A spiderweb stretched between the blackberry bushes stops quivering and goes taut, straining to hear the waves coming from the cosmos, and water makes itself a home in the moss thallus, as if it were to forget about its most integral feature – that it flows.

Of course, Tokarczuk’s formidable reputation is not built on esoteric whimsy alone. She is a respected ethical activist and her novels often incorporate an explicit programme. Drive Your Plow sparked a debate about Polish hunting laws, while The Books of Jacob has been described as a “novel against nationalism”. In The Empusium her ever-present feminist agenda dominates. A substantial percentage of the novel depicts the male residents of Görbersdorf putting the world to rights. But Tokarczuk’s characters are obsessed with one subject in particular. “Wojnicz had noticed that every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women.”

These men have all sorts of stupid things to say about women (often under the influence of “Schwärmerei”, a mind-altering liqueur infused with local mushrooms). “It’s true, the female brain is quite simply smaller, and there’s no denying it when objective research has proved it”, opines Longin Lukas, a particularly objectionable character. At first this tactic is effective: it is powerfully depressing to think of intelligent men in the era of my great-grandparents spouting such nonsense, as they surely did. But Tokarzcuk takes it too far. It is all these men ever seem to talk about: the wandering womb, the benefits of marital rape, Darwin’s conjecture that women represent an inferior stage of evolution. These sections appear as naked polemic.

At the end the author’s note provides an explanation. “All the misogynistic views on the topic of women and their place in the world are paraphrased from texts by the following authors …”. There follows a long list of people who should have known better, from Thomas Aquinas through Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. I think it’s meant to be a “gotcha” moment – for the readers who sat through all that apparently fictional dialogue thinking it exaggerated for effect. But it’s still a heavy-handed rhetorical trick to lump so much sexist discourse into the same series of interminable conversations.

The novel is just 324 pages – a modest size by Olga Tokarczuk’s standards. It seems longer, because the energy really flags in the second third, which feels repetitive and unedited. It’s a risk, perhaps, of taking a line for a walk: at some point your charming doodle might turn into more of a scribble. Happily, all the various unlikely strands come together in the closing chapters. The eerily majestic finale is haunting, cathartic and gleeful – a zany confection that could only have come from this unpredictable, unique writer.

Claire Lowdon’s novel Left of the Bang was published in 2015

The post Everything led to women appeared first on TLS.