Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk: ‘We live with violence and misogyny like some sort of constant illness’
The Polish author on her new horror novel, the genius of John Cheever and chasing the London of her dreams
Sat 5 Oct 2024 13.00 EDT
Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, 62, was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 2018, the same year that she won the International Booker for her fragmentary novel Flights, cited by the judges for its “wit and gleeful mischief”. Annie Proulx has compared her to WG Sebald; for the London Review of Books, her 900-page historical epic The Books of Jacob (translated by Jennifer Croft in 2021) stands alongside “the great postmodern meganovels by Pynchon or Perec, Bolaño or García Márquez”. Tokarczuk, via the interpreter Marta Dziurosz, was speaking from Wrocław, Poland about her new novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, set amid creepy goings-on at a sanatorium before the first world war.
Where did this book begin?
The idea occurred to me many years ago but I was deeply engaged in The Books of Jacob and this funny sort of pastiche novel had to wait, even though I often work on different books at the same time and was also writing Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead [2009] on top of everything else. What actually helped The Empusium was the pandemic: after all my travels because of the Nobel, I had the chance to return home to my nest in the forests of Lower Silesia.
What led you to base it on Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain?
I have a love-hate relationship with that book. I’ve read it five or six times since I was a teenager and every time I read it differently – it grows with the reader. What struck me was my exclusion from the novel as a reader, and a person, from the questions it asked and the answers it gave. It made me realise that when I stood in front of my father’s bookshelves as a girl – at home it was my father who was dealing with books – a huge majority of the classic novels I could see dealt only with issues between men. I think this experience is quite widespread: girls have to confront their own absence in literature. I wrote The Empusium slightly out of anger and spite, I suppose.
At what point did the horror element come in?
I adore horror. But I realised, too, that only the tools of that genre could portray the topic I wanted to portray – the hidden violence, the misogyny that is rife in the entirety of our culture, which we live with like some sort of constant illness, like a predator that is always present and emerges from time to time to attack us.
My translator says I have a very British sense of humour that isn't picked up on as well in Poland
Has winning the Nobel prize made a difference to your work?
My first reaction [to the win] was a certain stiffening. The Empusium was therapy: writing is important but it’s also fun and can bring fun, be wild. I intend to remain close to this attitude; I don’t want to get dragged in the direction of prize-giving ceremonies and celebration.
Is it surprising to be your UK publisher’s top seller?
Very, but Antonia Lloyd-Jones [her translator] says I have a very British sense of humour – she says it isn’t picked up on as well in Poland as it is in the UK!
Before becoming an author, you were a psychotherapist. Has that shaped your approach to fiction?
I think so. Therapeutic work opened me to the strangeness of human existence. I learned that each person is a walking book – and to listen without focusing on the story that was going on in my own head.
You also lived in the UK for a while. What do you recall about that?
It was 1987. I’d just finished university and came to London to learn English and work a little bit, as so many Polish people did. I worked at a hotel at the back of Harrods. I lived on Fulham Road and went to Camden Town with a very international [crowd] to drink wine. Coming from communist Poland, this world was a huge shock – seeing the incredibly well-stocked bookshops and record shops was like taking an elevator directly to the seventh floor. I’ve visited London many times in the past 10 years; I’ve searched for that 80s London, which still appears in my dreams, but I’ve been unable to find it.
Do you have a favourite horror author?
I find modern horror quite cliche-ridden. I like horror from the late 19th and early 20th century: Edgar Allan Poe, the stories of the poet Gérard de Nerval, Dostoevsky, who wrote wonderful smaller works of horror. In Poland, we had Stefan Grabiński, a magnificent interwar writer who marries old-fashioned horror with the machinery of industrial society. If you like horror, I recommend a short story by Dino Buzzati, Seven Floors [1954], which is absolutely terrifying.
What have you been reading lately?
This autumn I’ve been gathering short stories. I’ve returned to Chekhov via George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. And John Cheever’s stories are absolutely genius; I was sorry when I finished reading the book, a feeling I haven’t had in a while.
Do you have a new project?
Yes, a very big novel I promised myself I’d write years ago: a sort of homage to people from Lower Silesia, this amazing area in central Europe which has been completely depopulated and then repopulated. It’s very dear to me, because I’m one of those people myself. Formally, the book is similar to Flights, but its panoptic vision requires a huge amount of intellectual effort and I feel very tired.
Name something you need in order to write.
Basic calm to hear the dialogue in my head. I’m incredibly happy when I’m thinking and writing; it’s a wonderful defence mechanism that I’ve developed against the trials of everyday life. But the story I’m writing now might be my last huge book, because I’ve been having horrible problems with my spine. My body says: “Tokarczuk, this position you’re in when you’re writing isn’t for you any more – you should retire.” And I think that’s what I’m going to do.
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
