Tag day after day, things happen in the world that cannot be explained with the laws that we know about things”: This motto, which comes from Fernando Pessoa, is the plot of Olga Tokarczuk’s “Horrible Story”, which, how so often in her case, plays in Lower Silesia. This time it is the health resort of Görbersdorf (today Sokołowsko), which was founded in 1855 by the doctor Hermann Brehmer and specializes in lung diseases. Among the patients who come from all over Europe is Mieczysław Wojnicz, a student of hydraulic engineering and sewerage engineering from Lemberg, who arrives here in September 1913 and, in order to cure his tuberculosis, accepts the not always pleasant treatment methods and the daily trip to the spa takes.
His accommodation is in a “guest house for gentlemen” that belongs to a certain Wilhelm Opitz and where several other patients live, including Longinus Lukas, high school teacher from Königsberg, August August, classical philologist and writer from Vienna, Walter Frommer, theosophist and Privy Councilor from Breslau, and Thilo von Hahn, art student and landscape painting expert from Berlin. There is something grotesque about most of these gentlemen. They have endless conversations about politics, culture, religion, civilization, revolution and much more, but very little comes of these discourses, in fact they seem to forget them quickly and start all over again the next day as if they were fine about the dispute as such. They constantly drink a liquor called infatuation, as willingly and in such quantities as if it were an elixir of life.
#Olga #Tokarczuks #Empusion