The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk

The short review is that this is a version of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain with a feminist view and a spin at the end. Like the original, sometimes it feels like it gets a bit bogged down in the mundane. Mieczyslaw Wojnicz is a young engineering student who has arrived in the village of Gorbersdorf to stay at a famed sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. He is staying at the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, slightly removed from the main campus, along with a motley crew of other patients, all in varying stages of illness. Wojnicz is an awkward man who is very sensitive to the atmosphere around him. He witnesses something startling on his first day at the Guesthouse letting us know that this place may not be as it seems and the sense of unease steadily grows. The misogyny is lethal in this place. Wojnicz’s days at sanatorium quickly follow a pattern. He visits the doctor, he and the other patients go for walks in the woods, he rests. In the evenings, they gather together at the Guesthouse and drink a liquor made from hallucinogenic mushrooms and discuss their great ideas--all of which leave him as low man on the totem pole, just one rung above women--barely. The reality of the place is slow dawning and devastating.