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.
A mischievous fairy tale about transformation, emotion and ambiguity. These are bracing remedies for a world that too often forces us toward stasis, indifference and binaries ... As ever, Tokarczuk’s prose — and Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ glorious translation thereof from the Polish — will knock the wind out of you ... Resonant.
It’s an odd, fascinating book—a blackly serious joke—from an author of great daring and intelligence ... The writing, in a cultivated translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, shares the easygoing gait and twinkling irony of Mann’s novel ... It makes for absorbing if often mystifying reading, but what stands out most is the philosophical conflict it stages between rationality and folk belief.
Modernity is circumscribed by an inexplicable atavistic power. In Tokarczuk’s hands, the staid genre of the bildungsroman erupts with sinister possibility ... The novel never fully commits to horror. With its sequential discoveries and prolonged tension, it hews more closely to the contours of a psychological thriller ... The final scenes are like something out of a dream ... Ably translated.
She has fallen into a rhythm, following each mystically inclined, formally challenging work with a light genre riff more focused on dictating a salient political message than pushing the bounds of art or reality. Unfortunately, her newest novel, The Empusium, only amplifies this pattern ... The novel’s endless conversations [have] a deadly flat quality because the ideas in question are not meant to be substantive. They are feints, leading us back to a fundamental misogyny. The arguments feel cobbled together from external sources because they are ... Crams potentially interesting ideas inside the straitjacket of a basic horror plot ... Space must be made for the reader to make their own associations and draw their own conclusions. Irony, ambiguity, ambivalence: all create a chance for misunderstanding. But they also create the necessary gap between author and reader that creates the space for meaning ... The Empusium is rarely more than it appears and frequently much less.
Brobdingnagian ... Can be enjoyed — and may even be more enjoyable — on its own merits ... Uniformly excellent translation ... Unearths glittering modern ideas by mining a rich, storied past.
A compelling plot ... There are three plot-twisting surprises, one that I guessed early on, one I was wrong about and one that floored me. Tokarczuk is a writer of definite views, many of which I disagree with, but this is clever, intelligent stuff, touched with genius.
Mann played devil’s advocate between his debating patients, giving each of them a lavish allocation of pages. Tokarczuk is less indulgent, arguments crisply summarised. Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation is fluid and engaging ... There’s an almost Borgesian quality to the resolution. But remember, this is Tokarczuk. Nothing is ever quite as it seems.
Falls into the ambiguous category of literary suspense and is woven through with magical realism ... Takes Tokarczuk until the last pages to shed light on this enigmatic title. In fact, the elusive quality of the plot and Wojnicz’s physical and mental wanderings take the reader on a circuitous journey that might be more concisely constructed.
Tokarczuk makes this novel all her own with her idiosyncratic blend of registers and genres. She is both a collagist and a doodler ... The energy really flags in the second third, which feels repetitive and unedited. It’s a risk, perhaps, of taking a line for a walk: at some point your charming doodle might turn into more of a scribble. Happily, all the various unlikely strands come together in the closing chapters. The eerily majestic finale is haunting, cathartic and gleeful – a zany confection that could only have come from this unpredictable, unique writer.
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.
Tokarczuk’s latest work 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.
