Eric Maas’s Reviews > The Empusium > Status Update

Woman is like […] an evolutionary laggard. While Mann had gone on ahead and acquired new capabilities, woman had stayed in her old place and does not develop. That it’s why a woman it’s often socially handicapped […] and must always be reliant on a man>. (p80)

Agreed upon by sickly men who are out of place and time.

Their black fingers held sloppily rolled cigarettes in dirty pallets, and their eyes shone out of their charred faces. I

mpossible for me to assume Tokarczuk is visually quoting David Lynch ‘s woodsman in Twin Peaks (Gotta light?). Which might mean that I may have finally found a connection between Mann & Lynch, whom I both obsess about

Sticky mud full of bark, pine cones and twigs spilled around heaps of smoldering logs, as if the skin of the forest had been ripped off, leaving the wound inflamed.

4. Chest and throat complaints

Where the Empusa is implicitely pointed out (first as a praying mantis and later in the description of the two, possibly three old crones. And return as the narrator (I assume) at the end of the chapter, seeing the grander scheme of the universe, unlike the inhabitants. Wojnicz is maybe singled out as he, in his anxieties, is closer to the truth than any of the others…

…the other was so ugly as to be fascinating. Her dripping lip made her look like an ancient sculpture depicting some sort of creature from Hades.

That’s quite specific, isn’t it. What creature could that be?

3. Pheasant distance

all these matters absorbed his mind, drawing the world inside, into the larger, chaotic space that each of us carries within like an invisible piece of luggage that we drag after us all our lives, without knowing why. Our true self.

O, so now it’s us? The narrator(s) and the reader alike?

No one believes in their own death.

…putting themselves in order after the anarchic reign of illness.

2. Schwärmerei

Opitz’s wife has committed suicide and Wojnicz finds her body on the dinner table. Later that day, a first acquaintance with the other guests. Peculiar lot. And the narrator(s) still observe from the oddest corners. How strange it may seem, it’s their story…

1. The guesthouse for gentlemen

Fascinating from the get-go. To notice the similarities and, more emphatically, the differences with Mann’s Zauberberg is a treat. Most significant possible the difference between Mann’s benevolent and ironic tone in majestis pluralis and Tokarczuk’s ‘we’, who like aliens, eerily and distantly observe Wojnicz.