The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
Ultimately a fiercely feminist work, one that skewers the destructive male principle exemplified by the casual sexism and vicious cruelty of many of the novel’s characters. The book also specifically calls out and decries various forms of gender-based discrimination and violence ... Tokarczuk’s bewitching narrative voice in this novel—by turns threatening and cajoling, and invariably odd—is brilliantly captured in the muscular English of translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones ... Tokarczuk’s erudite, subversive, and delightfully zany novel challenges us, too, to look hard at what’s being said and done around us, especially things we might prefer not to have to witness.
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Pulling from folktales, mythology, art, and literature, Tokarczuk’s novel spins a story that feels eerily familiar and yet totally new ... For Tokarczuk, telling odd and sometimes incredible stories seems to be a political choice, a way of challenging the official histories that get passed down ... A masterful novel.
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Deft and disturbing ... Tokarczuk knows her setting intimately ... Elegant and genuinely unsettling.
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