In Amundsen, a short story by Alice Munro, a young woman comes to teach at a sanatorium during the second world war. Asked by a doctor what she knows about tuberculosis (TB), she tells him she has read The Magic Mountain. Like the Alpine peak above Davos on which it takes place, Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel casts its vast shadow over any fictional work about illness, let alone those set in TB clinics.
The Empusium, which the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk has called her “retelling” of The Magic Mountain, takes place in the Silesian settlement of Görbersdorf, the real-life model for the sanatorium at Davos. Like Mann’s “simple young fellow” Hans Castorp, Mieczysław Wojnicz is also apparently unremarkable, a 24-year-old sanitation engineer who arrives at Görbersdorf with a mild case of TB. But there are hints too of a more troubling, undefined medical condition that has persisted throughout his life.
