I must admit, it does sound interesting, although usually I am not a huge fan of certain contemporary reconsiderations of classics (many of them are tawdrily subversive, which is boring), so let’s see.
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. ©
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