The Empusium, etc.

Two more titles from Fitzcarraldo Editions I finshed in the last few days are The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk and Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over. After thoroughly enjoying Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow… I have not fared as well with the other books of hers I’ve read. I wasn’t altogether convinced that the connections between the constituent parts of Flights were strong enough to stand the work properly upright as a whole. And I was unequal to the challenges of The Books of Jacob. While I loved parts of it (especially the scene-setting opening chapters) my attention flagged as the story’s momentum seemed to stall after the half-way mark.

As for The Empusium, despite its several fine ingredients, I once again had my reservations about the finished product. It’s an historical novel where the misogyny and other prejudices of its setting are scrutinized, and their parallels with contemporary attitudes implied. The conversations between its characters illustrated those points well enough, but at a length that, I felt, impeded the development of the plot. What might have been a good short horror story and an interesting accounting of early-20th-century attitudes seemed to me sub-optimally spliced together.

It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over was more to my taste. The back-cover blurb tells us, coyly, that its heroine is “voraciously alive in the afterlife”. Imagining some kind of limbo or purgatory as the setting, what I found instead was more like the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse from a zombie’s point-of-view. Which, I suppose one could argue, might be construed as a limbo of sorts. It must be one of the more ambiguous and literary zombie stories out there. I found enough to admire about it that I could forgive its several implausibilities: the protagonist and her fellow undead don’t breathe, for instance, but they do somehow engage in gnomic, bewildered conversation.