Olga Tokarczuk's Empuzjon was published in Polish by Wydawnictwo Literackie in 2022, a few years after the Nobel Prize had reorganized her international career. Antonia Lloyd-Jones's English translation, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, appeared from Riverhead in the United States and from Fitzcarraldo in the United Kingdom on the twenty-second of April, 2026. The translation has taken four years. It has been worth the wait.
The novel is set in the autumn of 1913 at a sanatorium called Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the Silesian town of Görbersdorf, which is now the Polish town of Sokołowsko. The town is a real place. It was, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the European center for the treatment of tuberculosis by altitude and clean air, and it housed the institution on which Hermann Brehmer pioneered the methods that Thomas Mann would later send Hans Castorp to Davos to receive.
Tokarczuk's protagonist is a young Polish engineer named Mieczysław Wojnicz, who has been sent to Görbersdorf by his father and his uncle to recover from a tubercular condition. He arrives at the guesthouse and falls in among a small group of male patients of various European nationalities, who spend their evenings in long, lubricated conversations about women, art, war, and the future of Europe.
The reference is impossible to miss. Mann's Der Zauberberg, published in 1924 but set in 1907, is about a young German engineer named Hans Castorp who is sent to a Swiss sanatorium to recover from a tubercular condition and who falls in among a group of male patients of various European nationalities, who spend their evenings in long, lubricated conversations about women, art, war, and the future of Europe.
Tokarczuk's novel is not a parody of Mann's. It is a reply to it. The reply is patient, attentive, and, in its closing third, quietly devastating.
What Tokarczuk has done is to write the book Mann did not write. Mann's sanatorium is, famously, a male preserve. The women in The Magic Mountain are objects of contemplation rather than subjects. Clavdia Chauchat, the Russian patient with whom Castorp falls in love, is a figure constructed almost entirely from the perceptions of the men around her. Mann's novel has many readers; few of them have failed to notice this.
Tokarczuk's reply is to fill the absent female perspective in by other means. The narrator of The Empusium is a collective female voice, never named, which observes the gentlemen of the guesthouse from somewhere above or around them. The voice is plural; the verbs are in the first person plural. The voice describes the men with a clarity the men do not extend to themselves or to each other.
Whose voice is it? The novel, with characteristic patience, does not say. It might be the voices of the women who clean the guesthouse, who appear in the background and are seen by the gentlemen only as silhouettes carrying trays. It might be something older. The Empusae of the title are female spirits from Greek folklore, shape-changers, often associated with sites where men have done harm to women.
The novel keeps the question open until the closing pages, and the closing pages do not answer it cleanly. What they do is to reveal what the gentlemen have not seen, which is that the local landscape around Görbersdorf contains, in its forests and ravines, the bodies of women whose disappearances over decades the local authorities have agreed not to investigate.
The revelation is not a plot twist in the genre sense. It is the slow surfacing of material the narration has been depositing on the reader's shore for four hundred pages. The reader who reaches it has the experience of suddenly seeing what she has been looking at all along.
The gentlemen's conversations are the book's longest set pieces. They are also its most unsettling. The men discuss, with the gravity of educated Europeans on the eve of the catastrophe none of them anticipate, the questions of women's nature and women's place. Their views range from progressive paternalism to outright contempt. The most loathsome of the views are voiced by Longin Lukas, the Catholic Pole; the most softly poisonous by August August, the Austrian classicist; the most fashionable by Walter Frommer, the Berlin theosophist.
Lloyd-Jones's translation is the achievement that makes the book legible to English readers. The Polish original works in several registers at once: the period diction of the gentlemen's salon speech, the older folkloric register of the narrating voice, the medical jargon of the sanatorium, the regional Silesian inflections of the local staff. Lloyd-Jones has rendered all four in distinct English registers without forcing any of them.
The translation includes a brief note at the back, three pages, in which Lloyd-Jones explains a few of the decisions she has had to make. The most consequential is the decision to keep the gendered grammar of the narrating voice visible in English, where it would otherwise disappear. She does this by occasionally inserting the word "we" where the original allows the verb form to carry the burden alone. The effect is faintly intrusive but is the right call. Without it, the English reader would lose the central technical feature of the original.
There is a sequence in the middle of the book in which the gentlemen take a walking expedition into the hills above the guesthouse, on the day of a local festival. They come upon a clearing in which the local women have arranged what looks like a tableau: figures made of straw, dressed in worn clothes, arranged in a circle. The gentlemen find this charming and slightly ridiculous. They take a photograph. They walk back to dinner.
The narrating voice, in the same scene, identifies each of the worn garments. This one belonged to Anna, who disappeared in 1899. This one belonged to Maria, who disappeared in 1903. This one belonged to Hedwig. The list runs for two pages. The gentlemen do not hear it. The reader hears it.
This double-track writing, in which the male perceptions and the female knowledge are placed on the page at the same time without communicating, is the book's central formal achievement. It is also its central moral one. The book is, structurally, about how one perceptual world can sit inside another without ever touching it, and about what is lost when the two do not touch.
The Fitzcarraldo edition, in the blue paperback livery that has become the visual signature of literary translation in English, is well made. The cover, by Ray O'Meara, shows a single black silhouette of a sanatorium against a pale ground. The book is 480 pages and is priced at £14.99, which for a translated literary novel of this length is below the going rate.
The reader who comes to The Empusium without having read Mann will still find the book a complete object. The reader who knows The Magic Mountain will find a sustained second voice rising alongside it, picking up the silences in the older book and filling them with a knowledge the older book did not possess. The result is not a corrective. Tokarczuk is too good a novelist to write a corrective. The result is a parallel book, sitting on the shelf next to its predecessor, asking the older book a question the older book does not quite have the language to answer.