The primal and the rational, the impenetrable forest and the tidy conservatory, the blurred and the polished, the androgynous and the differentiated, the ambivalent and the dominant, the gods and the engineers, the rabbit and the hunter, the disease and the healer, the fire of fever and the cold water cure: this series of binary terms is enough to penetrate the machine heart of the Polish storyteller Olga Tokarczuk. It outlines a theoretical context and at the same time leads to the thematic center of the new novel by the Nobel Prize winner for literature: the hospital as the actual human habitat, precarious life under supervision. “Empusion” is a sanatorium novel like Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” and it deserves this fairytale title just like its Davos model.
The new novel by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk – Culture
