Choose your country
Delivery choices and times vary depending on your location
Description:
About this item:
Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for The Empusium:
“Deft and disturbing. . . In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s crisp translation, Tokarczuk tells a folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone. . . elegant and genuinely unsettling.”—Hari Kunzru, The New York Times Book Review
“Pulling from folktales, mythology, art, and literature, Tokarczuk’s novel spins a story that feels eerily familiar and yet totally new… Just when you think you have this novel in your sight, it shimmers into something else entirely.” —The Atlantic
“A marvelous reframing of The Magic Mountain … [that] can be enjoyed — and may even be more enjoyable — on its own merits … Lloyd-Jones’s uniformly excellent translation of The Empusium is a much breezier read." —Boston Globe
“Tokarczuk masterfully maps out a new kind of horror story, one that weaves together elements of folklore and feminist allegory.”—Harper’s Bazaar
“In Tokarczuk’s hands, the staid genre of the bildungsroman erupts with sinister possibility…. A grand fantasy of revenge …taut, febrile.”—Washington Post
“A novel that in Tokarczuk’s dexterous hands transcends its own limits, further cementing the Nobel laureate as one of the most original storytellers of our age. Equipped with only our measly five senses, it leaves us questioning — just like her characters — what might be hiding in plain sight.”—Financial Times
“A magnificently haunting portrayal of health, death, and all that comes in between, The Empusium is one of Tokarczuk’s best works to date.” —Chicago Review of Books
"An odd, fascinating book—a blackly serious joke—from an author of great daring and intelligence…. What stands out most is the philosophical conflict it stages between rationality and folk belief. This is the thread that runs through all of Ms. Tokarczuk’s wildly various books.”—Wall Street Journal
“A mischievous fairy tale about transformation, emotion and ambiguity…Tokarczuk keeps the suspense at a low boil throughout, balancing moments of terror and revulsion... Until the horror and the beauty can no longer be contained, that is, and erupt into the novel’s utterly sublime conclusion. As ever, Tokarczuk’s prose — and Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ glorious translation … — will knock the wind out of you.… The Empusium asks: If bigotry and violence make up the bedrock of our cultural traditions, can we still teach ourselves new ways of seeing and thinking? If we squint hard enough, can we find the women and other unpersons hidden in the past — and the present?”—San Francisco Chronicle
“This rich gothic novel set in 1913 is certainly haunted, but also rife with social commentary on gender dysphoria, inequality, and prejudice. Readers will come for the eerie atmosphere but stay for the searing critique of society's tendency to discard its most vulnerable if it means maintaining a semblance of safety.”—Booklist
“The Polish Nobel winner ladles up a deliciously creepy revenge tale in this satirical spin on Thomas Mann’s 100-year-old masterpiece The Magic Mountain.”—The Guardian
“Olga Tokarczuk’s deft, dark satirical wit is on full display in The Empusium, which challenges the rigid patriarchal world of pre-WWI Europe with horror and humor.”—BookPage
“The gothic elements keep the blood stirring.”—Library Journal
“Reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious—and spooky—web of intrigue and suspense. A crucial addition to Tokarczuk’s oeuvre.” —Kirkus, STARRED review
“Tokarczuk concocts a potent blend of horror tropes and literary references (Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann) as she realizes the potential of her tale’s uncommon setting—a community set apart by the omnipresence of sickness and death, where the rules of civilized propriety give way to more fantastic possibilities. Readers will find much to savor.” —Publishers Weekly
“Historical fiction threaded through with a playful kind of literary horror, The Empusium . . . is in part a wry response to Thomas Mann’s classic The Magic Mountain, blending high philosophy with dark comedy, strange folklore, and hallucinogenic liquors.”—Goodreads, “Most Anticipated Boos of the Fall”
“Deft and disturbing. . . In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s crisp translation, Tokarczuk tells a folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone. . . elegant and genuinely unsettling.”—Hari Kunzru, The New York Times Book Review
“Pulling from folktales, mythology, art, and literature, Tokarczuk’s novel spins a story that feels eerily familiar and yet totally new… Just when you think you have this novel in your sight, it shimmers into something else entirely.” —The Atlantic
“A marvelous reframing of The Magic Mountain … [that] can be enjoyed — and may even be more enjoyable — on its own merits … Lloyd-Jones’s uniformly excellent translation of The Empusium is a much breezier read." —Boston Globe
“Tokarczuk masterfully maps out a new kind of horror story, one that weaves together elements of folklore and feminist allegory.”—Harper’s Bazaar
“In Tokarczuk’s hands, the staid genre of the bildungsroman erupts with sinister possibility…. A grand fantasy of revenge …taut, febrile.”—Washington Post
“A novel that in Tokarczuk’s dexterous hands transcends its own limits, further cementing the Nobel laureate as one of the most original storytellers of our age. Equipped with only our measly five senses, it leaves us questioning — just like her characters — what might be hiding in plain sight.”—Financial Times
“A magnificently haunting portrayal of health, death, and all that comes in between, The Empusium is one of Tokarczuk’s best works to date.” —Chicago Review of Books
"An odd, fascinating book—a blackly serious joke—from an author of great daring and intelligence…. What stands out most is the philosophical conflict it stages between rationality and folk belief. This is the thread that runs through all of Ms. Tokarczuk’s wildly various books.”—Wall Street Journal
“A mischievous fairy tale about transformation, emotion and ambiguity…Tokarczuk keeps the suspense at a low boil throughout, balancing moments of terror and revulsion... Until the horror and the beauty can no longer be contained, that is, and erupt into the novel’s utterly sublime conclusion. As ever, Tokarczuk’s prose — and Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ glorious translation … — will knock the wind out of you.… The Empusium asks: If bigotry and violence make up the bedrock of our cultural traditions, can we still teach ourselves new ways of seeing and thinking? If we squint hard enough, can we find the women and other unpersons hidden in the past — and the present?”—San Francisco Chronicle
“This rich gothic novel set in 1913 is certainly haunted, but also rife with social commentary on gender dysphoria, inequality, and prejudice. Readers will come for the eerie atmosphere but stay for the searing critique of society's tendency to discard its most vulnerable if it means maintaining a semblance of safety.”—Booklist
“The Polish Nobel winner ladles up a deliciously creepy revenge tale in this satirical spin on Thomas Mann’s 100-year-old masterpiece The Magic Mountain.”—The Guardian
“Olga Tokarczuk’s deft, dark satirical wit is on full display in The Empusium, which challenges the rigid patriarchal world of pre-WWI Europe with horror and humor.”—BookPage
“The gothic elements keep the blood stirring.”—Library Journal
“Reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious—and spooky—web of intrigue and suspense. A crucial addition to Tokarczuk’s oeuvre.” —Kirkus, STARRED review
“Tokarczuk concocts a potent blend of horror tropes and literary references (Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann) as she realizes the potential of her tale’s uncommon setting—a community set apart by the omnipresence of sickness and death, where the rules of civilized propriety give way to more fantastic possibilities. Readers will find much to savor.” —Publishers Weekly
“Historical fiction threaded through with a playful kind of literary horror, The Empusium . . . is in part a wry response to Thomas Mann’s classic The Magic Mountain, blending high philosophy with dark comedy, strange folklore, and hallucinogenic liquors.”—Goodreads, “Most Anticipated Boos of the Fall”
About the Author
Olga Tokarczuk is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker International Prize, among many other honors. She is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, two collections of essays, and a children's book; her work has been translated into more than fifty languages.
Review:
4.5 out of 5
90.00% of customers are satisfied
5.0 out of 5 stars Clever and gripping
This novel is a bit of an homage to Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"--a thick novel dripping with philosophy and the dying culture of the pre-World War I Europe. There are sly referrals to Mann's book all over (such as a claim that the sanatarium town of Görbersdorf was the model for Davos, where "Magic Mountain" was set and the homely nurse Sydonia having one one, but two styes in her eyes a la Adriatica von Mylendonk.) The novel is set in Western Poland (Silesia) in 1913 and is a mystery-murder and philosophical novel with weird happenings, a hallucinogenic herbal liqueur, astonishing misogyny (the discussions of women treat them like a superior kind of semi-sentient animal, running on instinct only) and more.The book gets you from the initial pages, where people are described as parts (boots, shoes, skirts) and you get the spooky feeling that bad things are going to happen, which they do right from the outset.Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature and what's unusual is she's a bestseller in the UK--she's no ivory tower literary giant. Her books in Polish or translation to English are readable, fascinating and show a masterful storytelling ability. I haven't been this delighted in an author for a long time. Highly recommended.
4.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding
I have read almost everything by this author. This book is highly relevant in today’s political environment. The concept that women are only for procreation and are less than men is clearly understood by the men in this book. This is an angry book and not easy to read.
5.0 out of 5 stars More magical than the 'the Magic Mountain'
This book completely surprised me. Not something that happens very often. The last time I remember was reading 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead' by the same author. The ending was nothing like I would ever have imagined. It starts out as a satire of the book by Thomas Mann also based in a TB sanitarium right before WWI when all of Europe's set certainties came to a crashing end. Except that the pervasive misogyny of that world (not that it has entirely disappeared in ours yet), is paraded during the (all male) patients' nightly conversations about the state of the world while drinking the local liquor that is made with hallucinogenic mushrooms. Those attitudes don't hold up well in retrospect and we see how deep they are built into Western culture. The oddly passive main character, an unformed young person who was bullied by their father into being macho floats through this place and tries to find their place in the world. Then things get super WEIRD... I will not give away the spoiler, but it all turns 180 degrees and a massive balancing of everything happens. Somewhat similar to how Ms. Tokarczuk turned everything in a different direction from the apparently supernatural into a realistic but unexpected ending that fit perfectly into the puzzle she built up and gave a satisfying fitting end to the story of 'Drive Your Plow...'; this one does the opposite but to even more powerful effect. It must be experienced to understand. The Nobel committee did not err in giving her the prize. Read all her books. She is unique and wonderful.
5.0 out of 5 stars all is not as it seems, one has to squint to see clearly
Stunning. An overpowering allegory of ruthless desperation, wrapped up in turn-of-the-century manners. The author is a master of language and a brilliant diagnostician of the human condition. The novel, which on its face is a story of a group of men living in a Swiss sanatorium, is also a dialogue about discrimination, misogyny, and invented myths that justify the worst in human behavior. A great deal tumbles out at the end, as the only worthy woman in the story finds her way. The style (and inspiration?) evoke Thomas Mann or the fabulous Norah Lange, both of whom describe the prison within.
Damaged book
I'm halfway through this novel, and it's proving fascinating. But just like the previous reviewer , I received a copy that looked rather battered....
Book is damaged upon delivery. The contents is phenomenal
Damaged bookGreat writing
Visit the Riverhead Books Store
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
BHD16753
Quantity:
|
Order today to get by
Free delivery on orders over BHD 20
Product origin: United States
Electrical items shipped from the US are by default considered to be 120v, unless stated otherwise in the product description. Contact Bolo support for voltage information of specific products. A step-up transformer is required to convert from 120v to 240v. All heating electrical items of 120v will be automatically cancelled.
All product information listed on the site are from 3rd party sources, including images and reviews. bolo.bh is not liable for any claims or promotions mentioned on the product description or images with textual content. For detailed product information, please contact the manufacturer or Bolo support by logging into your account. Unless stated otherwise during checkout, all import taxes and duty are included in the price mentioned on the product page. bolo.bh follows the rules and regulations of sale in Bahrain and will cancel items in an order that are illegal for sale in Bahrain. We take all the necessary steps to ensure only products for sale in Bahrain are displayed. Product stock and delivery estimate may change with the seller even after placing the order. All items are shipped by air and items marked “Dangerous Goods (DG)” by the IATA will be cancelled from orders. We strive to process your order as soon as it is finalized.
More from this brand
Similar items from “Genre Fiction”
Share with
X
Or share with link
https://bolo.com/