On Returning to and Reinterpreting the Classics: Olga Tokarczuk in Conversation with Translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Olga Tokarczuk has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Book International Prize, among many other honors. She is the author of a dozen works of fiction, two collections of essays, and a children’s book; her work has been translated into fifty languages. Her new book, The Empusium, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is available now.

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Antonia Lloyd-Jones: In Drive the Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, you reimagined the murder mystery trope. Now, in The Empusium, you invoke the horror genre—in fact, the subtitle of The Empusium is A Health Resort Horror Story. Why this choice this time—what kinds of possibilities does it open up? The book is genuinely scary at many points, but also often very funny. How and why did you cut the horror with comedy?

Olga Tokarczuk: I’m not a great believer in categorizing fiction by genre. Literary genres exist to help librarians and booksellers decide which shelf to place a book on, and they can also help some readers choose what to read. Dressing a novel in the costume of a genre can also be a form of communication between author and reader—it gives readers a guarantee that we’ll be following set rules, which may give them a sense of being in their comfort zone. When I write a novel, however, I move around in the vast universe of literature without thinking about the genre or about sticking to its traditional rules, except in order to dispute them. But in this case the choice of the horror genre also makes sense because the main theme of this book is essentially a horror story—of patriarchal horror, protracted in historical time, embedded within culture, with all its traditional features, such as rivalry, a black-and-white, binary view of the world, and misogyny.

Not wanting to spoil readers’ enjoyment, I’ll just mention that the book includes a lot of (crypto)quotations, paraphrases and references to the classic literature of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The ideas they express shaped contemporary sensibilities, formatted our minds; we are still feeling their influence to this day. And even if those ideas now seem absurd and abusive, they still have numerous supporters. It’s worth taking another look at them to reveal their shocking dimensions, like something out of a horror story.

I have taken the liberty of taking this horror story of the patriarchate to its furthest extreme, until its arguments cross the boundary into absurdity; instead of being frightening, they reveal themselves to be preposterous and laughable. So there’s no lack of comical situations and (black) humor in this book, because in general the tragicomic dimension of our existence is the most real.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones: Like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, The Empusium follows a young man being treated for tuberculosis at a health resort on the eve of World War I. Is the novel an homage to Mann’s book? A critique? Does it matter if the reader has read it or not?

Olga Tokarczuk: I don’t think any new book appears out of nowhere, as if it materialized out of thin air or from the moon. Consciously or not, it is inspired by other books we’ve read, subjected to our own experience and thought. All human culture refers to what came before, it makes nonstop connections and debates with it, like a living organism.

The Empusium is a conscious, carefully thought-out reference to the work of one of my favorite writers, Thomas Mann, who had a very strong influence on my thinking about literature in the past and whom I rate very highly. I have read The Magic Mountain many times, and every time differently, which seems to confirm the brilliance of the work. Nowadays, after reading it so many times, I perceive it as a quite amusing novel full of subtle irony on how culture teaches us to think about the world, how it hands us ready-made recipes for understanding it, and how it helps us to create opinions that we regard as our own. It’s undoubtedly one of the most important European books. Written a hundred years ago, after the First World War, it endeavors to understand how such terrible violence came to erupt, and it underscores that the notions, prejudices and simplifications to which we surrender, our evident mistakes in thinking, have actual, specific consequences.

Nowadays when we read many classic works of literature, we are struck by the absence of women, or simply by their misogyny. In my childhood, as an ardent reader, I simply accepted that that’s how things were: The world belonged to men. The classics are full of men discussing serious matters and enduring existential dilemmas, while women are hidden in the background in their social roles, worrying about a burnt pudding or an unfashionable hat, doing their best to be a good mother, an attractive lover, or a resourceful wife. The Magic Mountain is an example of one of these great books without women, written in its time and with the characteristics of that time.

I think it’s important to keep returning to the classics and reinterpreting them, looking for new meanings, and sometimes doing a bit of sparring with them. Of course, The Empusium can also be read without reference to Thomas Mann or the context of The Magic Mountain.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones: At the men’s guest house where the young man stays, the other residents discuss politics and philosophy each night, returning obsessively to the inferiority of women. Meanwhile, in its private moments, back stories, and subplots that range beyond the confines of the sanatorium, the novel probes the gray areas of sex and gender. What kinds of questions are you exploring in the tension between these axes?

Olga Tokarczuk: I’m interested in everything that lies in between clearly defined opposites. Anything that’s not fully defined, that’s hard to categorize, internally contradictory, and is usually denied or forgotten because it doesn’t fit our rigid, limited image of the world. In a way it’s my method—to follow that in-between area of existence, which can probably only be presented in literature. These border zones have always attracted me, and I’m always looking for ways to express them.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones: This is an incredibly sensual and atmospheric novel, set in a lush mountain landscape full of strange and intense sounds, tastes and smells, where the characters frequently imbibe a hallucinogenic drink. What is interesting to you about evoking and provoking this unreliability of the senses?

Olga Tokarczuk: We only know the world to the extent our senses allow us to. We can’t imagine what the world is like from the viewpoint of a grasshopper or a shoal of fish, or even a dog. We are dependent on our senses in a fundamental way. By this I mean to say that a vast expanse of existence will never be accessible to us and will remain forever beyond our understanding. That’s why I chose as epigraph this beautiful passage from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet: “Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.”

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Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is available now from Riverhead Books.