Nothing is ever quite as it seems in the world of Olga Tokarczuk. Her latest novel starts with an epigraph taken from Fernando Pessoa: ‘The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.’ Wild deer were murder suspects in her surreal and beautiful 2018 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. This time nature itself plays a significant role.
A daily glass or three of schwarmerei restores good cheer, sometimes generating hallucinogenic euphoria
Though the novel describes itself as ‘a horror story’, it’s more a salutation to the power of the natural world and a celebration of difference. Tokarczuk is revisiting Thomas Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain, using Mann’s original as her template – a hard act to follow. It’s the same setting and timeframe – that golden, apparently calm period leading up to the first world war. Even the opening, with a young innocent entering the enclosed world of ill-health in the Silesian mountains is mirrored.
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