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Has Olga Tokarczuk Been Struck by the Nobel Curse?
Her latest novel, The Empusium, is more focused on dictating a salient political message than pushing the bounds of art.
Beginning with the 2007 publication of her Man Booker International Prize–winning novel, Flights, she has fallen into a rhythm, following each mystically inclined, formally challenging work with a light genre riff more focused on dictating a salient political message than pushing the bounds of art or reality. It resembles the liberatory moment in Tokarczuk’s 2013 Books of Jacob(translated by Jennifer Croft), when the dying Yente swallows a spell and her soul flies off through the night, part of that wind that is really “the vision of the dead.” In changing her perspective, the old woman has liberated herself of body, sex, nationality. Whatever her attraction to genre material, Tokarczuk does not write gripping narratives, and her new one jerks irregularly along, introducing plot threads — the voices, the dead men, the strange chair in the guesthouse’s attic, then dropping them, sometimes for hundreds of pages, so that we can listen to more philosophizing.
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