The Bookshelf
Stella Chrysostomou of VOLUME reviews four new books.
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
By Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
$40
Text Publishing / Fitzcarraldo Editions
It’s 1913. Mieczysław Wojnicz has been sent to the Silesian resort of Gorbersdorf for fresh air, cold baths, and medical attention. At the Guesthouse, after a day of health procedures, his fellow guests sit down to dinner together and pass the evening discussing existence, human behaviour, psychology, and politics – and their flawed but common views on the inferiority of women. The gentlemen also tease young Wojnicz. The timid Wojnicz is unnerved, and this is not helped by the house’s strange creakings, the cooing in the attic, and the whoosh of that new thing, electricity – not to mention the horror chair upstairs, the dates on the gravestones in the cemetery, and the odd behaviour of the charcoal burners.
Secrets abound (and Wojnicz has several of his own). Tokarczuk builds this multi layered tale from snippets of Greek mythology, horror tropes, the new ideas of the period, and as a response to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (published 100 years ago). She provides both black humour and a deadly serious exploration of ideas, lambasting the misogyny of the 20th century canon and the continued influence of these writers, philosophers and psychologists. There is also an uncanny sense of being watched, that things are not what they seem, and that justice will somehow be done.
As Wojnicz finds the Guesthouse increasingly repressive, the rigours of treatment intrusive, the effects of liquor to be avoided, and the tragic decline of a fellow guest unbearable, he also finds in himself a strength as yet untapped. He explores the depths of the house and the village in an attempt to discover what drives the men of this village to act as they do. Reading The Empusium is like looking through a telescopic lens, one that fogs over but is repeatedly cleared by a whisk of a cloth, bringing everything into sharp relief. If you haven’t read Tokarczuk, it’s time to start.
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
By Olivia Laing
$50
Picador
Laing’s restoration of an old walled garden in Suffolk raised a crucial question for our age: who gets to live in paradise? Moving between real and imagined gardens - from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to an aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery – Laing interrogates the costs of paradise on earth and introduces us to visionaries and idealists who believed that a garden could make life better for all.
COMFORT
By Yotam Ottolenghi and Helene Goh
$70
Ebury Publishing
With over 100 flavour-forward recipes alongside stories of childhood and home, Ottolenghi transforms simple food into something entirely delicious.A bowl of pasta becomes Caramelised Onion Orecchiette with Hazelnuts & Crispy Sage, a warming soup is Cheesy Bread Soup with Savoy Cabbage & Cavolo Nero, and a plate of mash is transformed into Garlicky Aligot Potato with Leeks & Thyme.
The Gavin Bishop Treasury
By Gavin Bishop
$45
Puffin Books
This beautiful hardback collection features ten enduringly favourite tales: Mrs McGinty and the Bizarre Plant, Bidibidi, Mr Fox, Chicken Licken, A Apple Pie, The Three Little Pigs, Little Rabbit and the Sea, Stay Awake, Bear!, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and Rats! Bishop’s quirky illustrations and crisp text make this the perfect book to share.