This is the first book I’ve ever read by Olga Tokarczuk so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I think I was expecting something a bit more—heavy-going, maybe? Harder to read? A slog, even? I mean, this is billed as a kind of response to The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and while that’s pretty much the only Mann book I’ve ever particularly liked, it’s still a lot of book to get through, so I figured this would also be a lot to get through.

Spoiler alert: I loved this. I loved it from start to finish, but during the last ten pages or so I REALLY loved it. It’s set in a health resort (read: sanatorium) in a Silesian village in 1913, and the protagonist is a young Polish man who is sent there to recuperate from (ostensibly) a lung ailment. Most of the rest of the main characters are also men of various ages convalescing in the mountains, spending their days receiving treatments and wandering through the village, and their nights drinking a seemingly hallucinogenic liqueur and rambling on about how terrible women are (we find out in an author’s note at the end of the book that their ramblings are taken directly from the writings of men through the ages, ranging from Plato to Jack Kerouac—ouch).

It maybe doesn’t sound like the most exciting set-up for a story, but there’s enough fine character development, and magnificently rich scene-setting, and unsettling mystery to keep things rolling along beautifully. There’s also an undercurrent of very dry humour, and there’s affection for the troubled main character—and considering the subtitle of the novel is “A Health Resort Horror Story”, I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that there’s also some truly weird folk-horror stuff in there as well.

I don’t speak Polish so I’m not in a position to comment with any authority on Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, but every linguistic choice seemed to be perfect to me. I thought the language was gorgeous and evocative, and as I plowed through the book, the only times I was brought up short was when I found myself stopping to think “wow, that’s a lovely sentence” or “that’s a great turn of phrase”.

I’m now very excited to know that I have so many other Tokarczuk books ahead of me to read!

Further reading…