Tokarczuk’s bewitching narrative voice in this novel—by turns threatening and cajoling, and invariably odd—is brilliantly captured in the muscular English of translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who also gave us Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and two other previous Tokarczuk novels. Lloyd-Jones is always up for some hilarious deadpan, as when the narrators remark, before launching into a complex description of Wojnicz’s newly acquired footwear, “We like inspecting boots.” Lloyd-Jones also provides passages of serene lyricism: “Just ahead of them, a sudden gust of wind twisted a small heap of leaves into a tiny whirlwind, a whirl-breeze, barely a whirl-puff.” In a book constantly shifting between the language of violent masculine opinion and forms of resistance to it, the translator’s ability to produce the required shifts in tone is key.
By the end, pretty much everyone and everything we’ve encountered has been revealed to be other than they first appeared, making The Empusium very much a novel about vision and learning how to see. Under fever-racked Thilo’s instruction, Wojnicz studies the art of “transparent looking” that “goes beyond the detail . . . to the foundations of the view in question, to the basic idea.” Wojnicz proves a most adept pupil. And Tokarczuk’s erudite, subversive, and delightfully zany novel challenges us, too, to look hard at what’s being said and done around us, especially things we might prefer not to have to witness. {read}