Health resorts are not always good for your health. In September 1913, this is the grim discovery made by Mieczysław Wojnicz, a young Polish student suffering from tuberculosis in Olga Tokarczuk’s absorbing new novel The Empusium (Fitzcarraldo, 324pp, £12.99), translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, situated in Görbersdorf in Prussian Silesia, now part of western Poland, is the sanatorium that hosts a cast of strongly opinionated men who, between medical treatments and bouts of eating and drinking, make grave pronouncements on the future of humanity. In this dark remake of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, we soon learn that by “humanity” the Gentlemen mean “mankind”, and that women are, in their opinion, the unfailing source of society’s ills.
Empusa, a shape-shifting being from Greek mythology, gives the book its title, and the male residents of the Guesthouse spend their dying days tracking the endlessly changing formulations of their own misogyny. These formulations prove all the more unsettling because, at the end of the novel, they are revealed to be directly based on pronouncements about women and their place in the world by authorities ranging from Augustine of Hippo to William Butler Yeats.
Not long after arriving in Görbersdorf, our protagonist happens upon the body of Frau Opitz – the wife of the unfailingly sinister owner – who has been brutally murdered. Rumours circulate about the savage killings of young male patients at a specific moment of the year, and the novel traces the bloody history of these cruel sacrifices. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist is exceptionally adept at blending the high-minded sanctimoniousness of the sanatorium with the ever-present threat and legacy of violence.
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Tokarczuk delights in shifting points of observation, so whether it is a cluster of hats at a church service or a congregation of shoes under a table, she brings an unmistakable vividness to her descriptions of the most ordinary of situations. At one point Wojnicz asks the resident doctor, Doctor Semperweiss, what the world is like and the physician replies: “ ‘Blurred, out of focus, flickering, now like this, now like that, depending one’s point of view.’”
As the young Pole grapples not only with physical illness but with gender identity, the student gradually realises that too often the opposite of something blurry is not clarity but dogma. Tokarczuk’s outstanding novel is a striking reaffirmation of literature’s genius for nuance in a world darkened by murderous polarities.
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary are often seen as the great tragic tales of extramarital love in 19th-century European literature. Less well-known in the English-speaking world is Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (Pushkin, 353pp, £10.99), now available in a modern translation by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers. First published in serial form in 1894-1895, the German novelist’s masterpiece was judged by Thomas Mann to have been one of the six most significant novels ever written.
Effi von Briest is an impulsive, imaginative 17-year-old whose world tragically shrinks on foot of her marriage to Baron von Instetten, a man who is many years her senior. After their honeymoon, they take up residence in the Baltic port town of Kessin (based on the real-life town of Swinemünde). The stifling decorum of Prussian officialdom in the provinces and the tedium of respectable domesticity drive Effi into the arms of an amiably feckless army officer, Major Crampas. When Instetten eventually learns of her infidelity, revenge is swift and catastrophic.
Instetten is not, however, a stock villain, no more than Effi is an idealised heroine. Both are the victims of unbending social conventions and a debilitating status anxiety. Effi’s affair with Crampas is less the grand passion of an Anna Karenina or the exalted imaginings of an Emma Bovary, and more a simple desire for attention and physical intimacy. Fontane’s style shuns the explicit. He prefers to hint at and make suggestions and the translators succeed admirably in capturing the essential sprightliness of Fontane’s prose. Pushkin Press are to be commended for bringing this big German writer back into literary circulation for English-language readers.
Constance Debré's debut work in English, Love Me Tender, published last year was a remarkable account of separation and the forensic cruelty of the French legal system in discriminating against mothers in same-sex relationships. Playboy (Tuskar Rock, 172pp, £10.99), translated by Holly James, is a disappointing sequel. Largely consisting of journal-like entries on encounters with different partners, the book feels more like a draft than a finished product.
The structural tightness of Love Me Tender is absent, and the disciplined rage of the earlier work gives way to a kind of petulant, teenage absolutism (‘The fact remains that people don’t really think[ ...][T]he vast majority of people living more or less cushy lives, it never seems to cross their minds that one day, they’re not going to wake up’).
Debré's virulent denunciation of her inherited class privilege sits uneasily with a ready assumption that she can dismiss, at will, the complexity of the lives of people she does not know. On the other hand, the unravelling of a key relationship with a younger woman demonstrates the continued, incisive force of her writing, and her experiences as a lawyer lend a welcome edge to her detailing of courtroom scenes. Just how demanding the form of autofiction can be is demonstrated when the fiction loses direction, and the writing self becomes a slave to randomness.
Random encounters are at the heart of Jungeun Yun’s Marigold Mind Laundry (Doubleday, 256pp, £12.99), translated by Shanna Tan. In this allegorical tale, the Korean heroine Jieun, who is gifted with special powers, accidentally sends her family into oblivion. Roaming the world in grief and perpetual exile, she eventually decides to make good on her loss by setting up a Mind Laundry in a village called Marigold. Here people can have their deepest and most enduring sorrow washed away for good.
A succession of broken hearts make their way to the Laundry, including a film-maker, a social influencer, a photographer, and two women who have been cheated on by their partners.
Allegory is notoriously tricky. Too simple, and readers feel they are being condescended to; too difficult and you lose your reader’s goodwill, their willingness to accept the artlessness of the story.
Yun creates a plausible cast of recognisable types and she has a fine sense of contemporary neuroses. The difficulty is that, on occasion, a line is crossed when it is hard to distinguish the therapeutic pronouncements of Jieun from fridge-magnet psychobabble (“If you’re angry, don’t hold it in. Eat something delicious to de-stress. Learn to live for yourself, not for anyone else”). The Marigold Mind Laundry will no doubt find an audience that is forgiving of these forays into hipster healing and enjoy a tale of redemption artfully told.
Redemption is a not a quality usually associated with one of France’s best known contemporary writers, Michel Houellebecq. The darling of a strain of reactionary anti-wokeism in French cultural life, his novels have often, though not uniformly, been characterised by a tone of cynical derision and unflinching pessimism. Annihilation (Picador, 525pp, £16.99), translated by Shaun Whiteside, will come as a surprise to many readers.
The central character, Paul Raison, is a senior figure in the French administration close to the Minister of Finance, Bruno Juge. The novel is set in the near future when a Macron-like figure is stepping down from the presidency, and political hopefuls, including Juge, are jockeying for position. Raison, who has previous experience in the French counter-intelligence service, becomes aware of a series of mysterious videos depicting the decapitation of the minister, which are circulating with impunity on social media. During this period, his father falls seriously ill and remains in a near vegetative state.
A mixture of political thriller, realist novel, and philosophical parable, Annihilation is Houellebecq’s most substantial work to date, weighing in at more than 700 pages in the French original. The most striking figure in the novel is Prudence, Raison’s partially estranged wife, who proves to be central to the more transformative moments in the narrative. She upends the casual misogyny of many of Raison’s assumptions and becomes a crucial presence as he navigates the rediscovery of feeling and the bracing reality of his father’s imminent demise.
Houellebecq’s ironic take on contemporary mores can often be devastatingly funny even if some of the targets are wearily predictable. Although there are many references to contemporary French politics and the cyberterrorist element has its own current feel, the real matter of the novel lies elsewhere, in that oldest of human plots: how can the certainty of annihilation be countered by the uncertain promise of love?
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
