September 1912. Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, a Polish student suffering from tuberculosis, moves into a boarding house in Görbersdorf, a “mountain health resort for chest patients” located in Prussian Silesia, near the Czech border.
Between meals at fixed times, walks in the fresh air, hydrotherapy sessions and medical consultations at the sanatorium, Mieczyslaw will find himself at the “Pension for Gentlemen” in charming company. Starting with the disturbing Mr. Opitz, the owner, whose wife hanged herself the morning of our hero’s arrival.
Among other tuberculous residents like him: a Viennese writer specializing in ancient languages, humanist and socialist, a teacher from Königsberg, terribly misogynistic, a terminally ill student of Fine Arts from Berlin.
For Mieczyslaw, a sensitive young man who lost his mother at a young age, raised by an authoritarian father obsessed with virility (“To be a man is to learn to become hermetic to what bothers you”, he was told learned), this stay is the paradoxical opportunity to finally be “almost free”.
With The Empouses Banquet“naturopathic horror novel”, her ninth, Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish novelist born in 1962, Nobel Prize for Literature 2018, signs a feminist and skillfully unhinged version of The magic mountain (1931), the great novel by Thomas Mann.
Between two small glasses of local liqueur, these gentlemen discuss major world affairs, a festival of clichés and misogyny. This will push the young man to take side roads, as well as to explore in an increasingly intimate manner the small room of the late Mrs. Opitz in the attic of the pension.
In fact, in Görbersdorf (now Sokołowsko, Poland), women are almost invisible. And yet, very quickly, the reader will realize that they are everywhere, “avid spectators” who are also, in a certain way, the narrators of the novel. It is they, we understand, who regulate the places, dark and living forces of nature, archaic souls of the mountains and the undergrowth.
And the regular disappearances of young men fuel local folklore, while corpses, it is said, were found torn to pieces in the forest. Some evoke witches or the female spirits of the places which recall the Empouses, these fantastic creatures from Greek mythology associated with the goddess Hecate, who seduce men and absorb their strength until they die. And if it was true ?
In this worrying and ambiguous climate, where death lurks everywhere – whether natural or not – appearances will gradually end up disintegrating and the truth of the world will appear in all its complexity. Mieczyslaw’s inner drama, linked to an “anomaly” which we will gradually appreciate, will find there the perfect theater to unravel.
With this supernatural novel in which Franz Kafka joins hands with Thomas Mann, the author of Pilgrims (Black on White, 2010) advances with its precise, almost cinematographic writing, and pushes the idea of transformation far.
An invitation to “also see with our other senses” and to consider the in-between.