First Impression Friday will be a meme where you talk about a book that you JUST STARTED! Maybe you’re only a chapter or two in, maybe a little farther. Based on this sampling of your current read, give a few impressions and predict what you’ll think by the end.

Synopsis:

September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and to debate the great issues of the day: Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone – or something – seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, with signature inventiveness, humor, and bravura.

Happy Friday everyone! That is another workweek in the books! I hope everyone is ending the work week on a high note. I hope you were able to accomplish all the tasks you started during the first day of the week. Give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done. It is now time to step back and dress down as the weekend approaches. I am also reminded that today is the first Friday of the tenth month of the year. How time flies! Before we know it, we will be welcoming a new year. I hope that before the year ends, you achieve all the goals you set for yourself at the start of the year. I hope that you will get recognized and repaid for all the hard work you put in this year. I hope the remainder of the year will be great for everyone, and that it will be brimming with good news, blessings, and pleasant surprises. More importantly, I hope everyone will be healthy in body, mind, and spirit.

To officially close another blogging week, I am sharing a fresh First Impression Friday update. This weekly blog meme has become part of a tradition, an integral part of my weekly blogging rites. It is a perfect way to cap a blogging week. It has also become a dual purpose. When I started doing it, it was meant to provide me space to figure out my feelings about the book I am currently reading. Over time, it has developed into a springboard for my book reviews. Last September, I had a mixed reading journey. It was meant to be for newly published books but with the lack of new books in my bookshelf, it evolved into a reading challenge catch-up. It seems that this going to be the trend this October for I have been reading books that just catch my fancy. After reading Yoko Ogawa’s latest translated novel, Mina’s Matchbox, I am now reading Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story (Empuzjon. Horror przyrodoleczniczy).

In both the case of the Japanese writer and the Polish Nobel Laureate in Literature, I was not aware that they would be releasing new works this year. However, upon learning of these new releases, I did not waste time adding them to my reading list and, thankfully, I did not have to wait long before I could obtain copies of the two books. Without ado, I included them to my ongoing reading journey. Mina’s Matchbox was my 99th read this year and my third book by Ogawa, making The Empusium the 100th book I read this year. The Empusium is also my fourth by Tokarczuk who I first heard of during the awarding of the 2018/2019 Nobel Prize in Literature. This makes Tokarczuk my most-read female laureate; Kazuo Ishiguro, with eight books, remains my most-read laureate.

Interestingly, The Empusium takes inspiration from a beloved novel written by another Nobel Laureate in Literature, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain which happened to be one of my favorite reads last year; my anticipation for The Empusium is then established. Tokarczuk’s latest takes us to the years before the First World War. In September 1913, a young Polish man named Mieczysław Wojnicz, a student of hydroengineering from Lwów arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Professor Sokołowski sent the engineer-in-training to the Guesthouse, which is near a sanitarium, to convalesce from tuberculosis. Wojnicz shares several parallels with Hans Castorp, the main protagonist of Mann’s literary masterpiece.

Like Castorp, Wojnicz met an eclectic cast of characters at the Guesthouse who are waiting for a place to open up at the sanitarium; the nearby sanitarium was created by Dr. Hermann Brehmer in a valley in the Sudetes and is said to be the prototype for other health spas like the one in Davos, Switzerland. Among the characters he met are Longis Lukas, a Catholic professor; August August, a Viennese lover of ancient Greek mythology; and Thilo von Hahn, a German Fine Arts student. It is a cosmopolitan selection, to say the least, again, reminiscent of The Magic Mountain. Things got more interesting when the lifeless body of Opitz’s wife was found. Her husband ruled it as a suicide; he was barely surprised by her death. Thilo, however, had other ideas. He believed it was anything but suicide, a hypothesis he shared with Wojnicz; being nearly of the same age, Wojnicz thought that he could be friends with Thilo.

So yes, death hovers above the story. After all, it is a “horror story.” Mrs. Opitz’s death wasn’t the first nor the only one. This makes me look forward to how Tokarczuk would spin the tale. From what I have read so far, the novel is a fusion of two Tokarczuk novels I have read so far: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead because of its folkloric and rather gothic elements, and The Books of Jacob because of the rich historical contexts. Regardless, it underlines how, with each work, Tokarczuk pushes the limits of her writing and storytelling. I can still remember how much in awe I am of Flights, an abstract and complex story. While it takes inspiration from The Magic Mountain, the indelible threads of Tokarczuk’s own brand of storytelling were astutely woven into the novel’s rich tapestry.

I can’t wait to see how Tokarczuk orchestrates the story toward a fitting conclusion. All of these make me look forward to how the story will unfold and ultimately conclude. How about you fellow reader? What book or books have you read over the weekend? I hope you get to enjoy whatever you are reading right now. Happy weekend!