Books I Read This Month: September 2024

Ian Frazier • Ta-Nehisi Coates • Olga Tokarczuk

Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough (Ian Frazier)

While a political exile in 1917, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky landed in New York after being expelled from France. He worked briefly as a dishwasher in Brooklyn, hoping for a rebellion in his motherland, awaiting the birth of a paradise. He arrived in utopia sooner than expected without even needing to haul dunnage aboard a ship—he just had to press a button in an elevator. Relying on financial assistance from supportive comrades, Trotsky moved his family to the Bronx and could not believe his eyes. The “Bronx Bolshevik,” as he was dubbed derisively by city newspapers, was not only taken with the borough’s natural beauty but by the creature comforts it afforded. Inside the apartment building that was to be his new home, he hopped aboard one of Elisha Otis’s machines, which lifted him to an $18-per-month unit featuring electric lights, a gas range, a bathtub, and a telephone. It was a place so magical even a prole could approve. Trotsky thought the Bronx superior to Paris or Vienna.

The sweep of history ensured Trotsky’s idyll in the borough was brief, but the halcyon period for locals went on for a long spell. In Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough, Ian Frazier’s generous, sui generis history, the author identifies a 50-plus-year period beginning in the 1910s when it was one of the best places on earth to live, a “new Valhalla across the Harlem,” a home to intoxicating nature and modern amenities. During this prelapsarian period, before the Bronx became the world’s five-alarm-fire capital, the borough bustled with socialists, most of them Jewish, agitating en masse to make sure the rents were not too damn high and public schools were brimming with resources. Not even the Great Depression could knock the cohesive community completely on its ass as it did most of the nation. When Anne Bancroft (née Anna Maria Louisa Italiano) entered Christopher Columbus High School at the end of World War II, her great native talent was exposed to top-notch speech, music, and theater programs. High-density neighborhoods crammed with educated children were a source of pride for everyone.

The importance of community is Frazier’s central theme, and it’s a lesson equally pertinent to every place outside of NYC’s most-derided borough. To understand the concept more fully, the restless, peripatetic author, who’s previously studied Siberia, the Great Plains, and Native American Reservations, immersed himself in Bronxiana, spending a decade walking a thousand miles in the borough, interviewing locals, and conducting copious book and newspaper research on the last 500 years of Bronx life. Only in the aftermath did he fully appreciate the necessity of people working together to maintain the social fabric when everything is coming apart at the seams. “I was eligible for social security before it occurred to me that a bunch of loners wandering around and doing as they pleased might not make much of a society,” he acknowledges. Frazier realized that the anti-hero outsider who “fills our national dreams” was not as noble as he’d believed. The author points to two terrible eras in the Bronx, one long before the five-decade golden age during the twentieth century and the one immediately after, when communal cohesiveness was overwhelmed to disastrous results.

The first awful time occurred during the Revolutionary War, a century before the expanse officially took its name from the 17th-century Swedish settler Jonas Bronck. Sandwiched between British and Continental armies was a large piece of land called the “Neutral Ground.” The area, a hell on earth for the seven years the war played out, “prefigured the Wild West before the concept had entered the dime novelist’s mind.” In that lawless, unsettled period, Yankee “Raiders” and Tory “Cow Boys” alike terrorized pre-Bronxites living in the unfortunate address. Violent attacks became commonplace, and homes were continually plundered. Nobody trusted anybody, neighbor or stranger, as the societal foundation collapsed. Order wasn’t restored until after America won its independence.

The other terrible era is a more recent one, the previously referenced incendiary stretch, which Frazier assigns a 1963 start date. The accidental fires and unending arson wouldn’t begin in earnest until the next decade, but that was the year Robert Moses’s prized project, the soul-killing, ugly-as-sin Cross Bronx Expressway, was completed. Nothing was the same again, as scores of apartment buildings were demolished during “the violence of the construction.” The borough came to be viewed as acreage meant to serve more upscale communities with delivery trucks and factories incessantly belching fumes, making the Bronx the least healthy county in the state. (It still is.) Moses wasn’t the only villain, however.

The long-range schemes of regional planning committees regarding transportation, ports, etc., did good for the larger metropolitan area but “contributed to the immiseration of the Bronx.” NYC’s mid-’70s economic crisis certainly hurt, and racism reared its ugly head as it does almost always in American tragedies. The redlining of the growing non-white Bronx communities made it impossible for owners to maintain and upgrade their houses and buildings, eventually turning them into tinderboxes. In 1976, there were 33,465 fires in the Bronx. A year later, a thousand fires occurred in the borough during the NYC blackout on July 13, 1977. Some were arson, often done intentionally by building owners to collect insurance money. Many, however, were caused by a lack of home-improvement loans being available in Black and Latino neighborhoods.

Making matters worse was President Nixon severely slashing federal urban development funds beginning in 1972, following the RAND Corporation’s guidance that the government starve America’s struggling cities, forcing them into “planned shrinkage.” When the put-upon Bronx residents hollered that they needed financial assistance to keep the lights on in their borough, the “enlightened statesman” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a patrician philosopher-politician, argued that the locals deserved their predicament. More broadly, he thought “benign neglect” was the way forward for all Black communities in the country. But there was nothing benign about neglect.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” is what Cosell is remembered as saying, though he never actually used that phrase, the same way that Rick Blaine never said, “Play it again, Sam.” If the quote was apocryphal, the sentiment, however, was apt.

After a United Nations speech in 1977, President Jimmy Carter was famously driven via motorcade through the grim, burned-out borough for an unannounced visit, emerging shaken by what he witnessed. A week after Carter’s stop, Howard Cosell banged on before a national TV audience during Game 2 of the World Series about fires consuming the borough beyond the walls of Yankee Stadium. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” is what Cosell is remembered as saying, though he never actually used that phrase, in the same way that Rick Blaine never said, “Play it again, Sam.” If the quote was apocryphal, the sentiment, however, was apt. Frazier succinctly describes the harrowing combination of fire, drugs, poverty, and crime brought about by neglect: “Every violence that could be visited on a place, short of carpet bombing, had been visited on the Bronx."

Before the good times, the bad ones, and the boogie-down borough’s recent revival, there were the beginnings of Europeans encroaching on Native peoples’ land and imposing new rules on the “New World.” One of the pre-Bronx’s biggest movers and shakers was Gouverneur Morris, born in 1752 to a wealthy family on land that would later become part of the borough. Like most people, Morris was good and bad—but he acted out his role on the grandest stage. A confidante of George Washington, Morris was a key Revolutionary War figure, though he usually found urgent errands that needed doing elsewhere when the actual battles commenced. Gun-shy would be the polite way to put it. Although opposed to slavery, he owned slaves and had a demeaning attitude toward Black people. He was a key force behind the building of the Erie Canal and the design of Manhattan’s superb grid system. A relentless manwhore who experienced all manner of STDs, Morris died when trying to assuage a urinary tract infection by inserting a whale bone into his blocked, inflamed penis, which caused a fatal urethra infection. In the 64 years of his wonderful, terrible life, however, his most important contribution probably occurred when he was a tireless member of the Continental Congress. Assigned with penning the preamble to the Constitution, he placed the phrase, “We, the People,” at the outset. It’s a credo that protects against tyranny, provided the people are basically decent.

That egalitarian encapsulation of America’s promise also speaks to the book’s theme. It isn’t a history, like so many histories, propelled by the Great Man Theory. Neither Morris nor Trotsky nor Carter nor any other bold-faced name in these chapters is the most important figure. Frazier also doesn’t locate one local with main character syndrome like Le War Lance, the fascinating Oglala Sioux fabulist who commandeered the spotlight in the writer’s excellent 2000 nonfiction title, On the Rez. Many culprits led to the Bronx’s steep decline, and there have been a large number of heroes who’ve revived the borough after it became a punchline, a fire-bombed husk, a corpse. These folks are the main focus of the book.

It will take even more community action to ensure that the local heroes in the Bronx aren’t elbowed aside by gentrification. The fight never stops.

Hetty Fox took over a vacant building on her South Bronx block and transformed it into a rec center where she teaches children African dance. The Mendez-Saavedra family owns and operates La Morada, an acclaimed Mott Haven Mexican restaurant specializing in Oaxacan fare. The family, which originally crossed the border into America without documentation, prepares 650 free meals daily to feed unemployed and homeless Bronxites. There were the numerous teachers at Samuel Gompers Technical High School in East Morrisania (yes, named for Gouverneur’s ancestors) who taught Joseph Robert Saddler about “resistors and capacitors and vacuum tubes and the technology of record players,” which allowed him the know-how to separate himself from others DJs and live up to his glorious rap name, “Grandmaster Flash.” (Much of the latter stages of the book are dedicated to the rise of hip-hop in the Bronx from DJ Kool Herc forward.) Locals did the heavy lifting, adopting parks and removing debris, but they didn’t do it alone. Borough, state, and federal politicians of good faith met them halfway, seeding all sorts of initiatives, investing in a place others considered a lost cause. It was a more methodical than miraculous process and it gradually worked. Even more community action will be needed to ensure that the local heroes in the Bronx and their sons and daughters aren’t elbowed aside by growing gentrification. The fight never stops.

While conducting research, Frazier retraced by foot on eight occasions the approximately 10-mile limo ride President Carter took in 1977, allowing the writer to see how the area had stirred to life once more. But there are other interesting strolls to be taken in the Bronx. If you’re an able-bodied person with decent sneakers, you could walk from the Riverdale mansion where John F. Kennedy lived with his family as a boy to the East Tremont location where Lee Harvey Oswald resided with his mother for 17 months during his unhappy childhood. It’s a path that connects one of America’s most famous figures and one of its greatest villains. But the non-famous folks from the community you meet on your way might make a greater impression on you.•

The Message (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

We tell stories in order to live, but what if we tell the wrong ones? On the eve of the American Presidential election, as I begin to write this review, a druggy, edgelord podcast host who thinks it unlikely the moon landing occurred just endorsed an avowedly fascist Reality TV personality to return to the highest office in the land even after he previously instigated an unsuccessful violent coup attempt. The podcaster did so at the behest of a promoter of mixed martial arts fights who was captured on a security camera slapping his wife during a drunken argument and a multi-billionaire technologist who dreams of rocketing to Mars and can’t stop engaging with Holocaust deniers. All of these damaged men and many more in their orbit are in thrall of conspiracy theories about UFOs, the JFK assassination, vaccines, climate change, etc. They believe some lies and tell others, and they’re all part of a toxic, unfettered new media in which truth is warped. It’s the destruction of narrative, among other things.

“The cradle of material change is in our imaginations and ideas,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Message, his 2024 non-fiction title about the power of storytelling as well as about current events, a book he directly addresses to the impressive students of a composition class he taught recently at Howard University. Even though he’s far from a wide-eyed optimist, Coates means this declaration in a mostly hopeful sense. From Jim Crow to George Zimmerman to Donald Trump, stories have been weapons used to trample truth and decency, but the Civil Rights Movement narrative told a story that shifted us closer to something like justice. “Writing is a powerful tool of politics,” he further offers. It’s an obvious statement but one that he’s spent much of his life meditating on. An indifferent student as a child, Coates worshiped words from the jump, entranced by their musicality, the way lines on a page could entertain him. After reading a 1983 article about the paralyzed football player Darryl Stingley in Sports Illustrated, he realized that words could do more than merely play. They could teach about a world beyond the self—even shape worlds.

Learning is something Coates was determined to never leave behind in youth. “The best part of writing is really to educate yourself,” he told a New York Times interviewer in 2015 after winning the National Book Award. “I don’t want to be anybody’s expert. I came in to learn.” To continue his education, the author recently visited the historic home of the slave trade in Senegal, a book-banning hot spot in South Carolina and the West Bank and Jerusalem, and what he found on these trips makes up the crux of his new work. It marks his return to the public intellectual sphere after he recused himself to write Marvel Comics and his first novel, weary of criticism from both the left and right, though Coates himself wasn’t always pleased with his output.

Coates now feels great regret about his choice. The piece made his career, but he believes he played to the prejudices of his editors at the publication, that he unwittingly acted as a tool of the status quo.

His most famous magazine article, “The Case for Reparations,” was published a decade ago while he was on staff at the Atlantic. It was a call for restitution for the descendants of American slaves, who were harmed not only by enslavement but also in the postbellum period by Jim Crow laws and widespread practices like redlining. The piece used as its central example the way Israel was compensated by Germany financially as a means of redressing, just a little, the horrors of the Holocaust. The storytelling and formal structure are laudable, but the suffering of Palestinians, who are living under apartheid, is given short shrift in the name of his article’s narrative arc.

Coates now feels great regret about his choice. The piece made his career, but he believes he played to the prejudices of the editors at the publication, that he unwittingly acted as a tool of the status quo. (It goes unmentioned that Atlantic EIC Jeffrey Goldberg, a marvelously talented writer and editor, is a former IDF prison guard and a staunch defender of Israel.) Coates fully acknowledges he was uneducated about the hottest spot in the Middle East and its tortured history. Trying to make amends, he went on a 10-day fact-finding mission in the summer of 2023, which seems a comparatively peaceful period in the region considering what’s happened since. It’s a surprise it took him so long to try to school himself on the topic after the backlash the piece received from Israel’s critics, but it’s an earnest effort. The reportage, however, is disappointingly slight.

Before sharing his findings about his reconnaissance mission to the Middle East, Coates writes of two other trips. The first is Senegal, the West African origin point of the slave trade that forced millions, including his ancestors, into brutal servitude in America. He notes how literature was created that diminished Africans, rationalized the atrocity of bondage, and depicted slaves as less than human. “For such a grand system, a grand theory had to be crafted,” he rightly asserts. As an example, he writes of how the bigoted nineteenth-century Egyptologists George Gliddon and Josiah C. Nott explained away the astounding science and culture created by the Black people of Ancient Egypt by somehow arguing that those Egyptians weren’t Black. Racists can contort themselves to believe almost anything to maintain a grip on power, so plenty of people bought into this junk theory.

The reductive attitudes didn’t end even after the Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt, who traveled the continent, described Africans in a 1910 book as “ape-like, naked savages” who needed the “masterful leadership of the whites.” The obvious brilliance of many Black people, Americans and otherwise, was buried beneath this type of belittlement. Coates realizes that he too has been affected by growing up in a culture that viewed Blackness as lesser. “Everywhere I went in Dakar, I was amazed—too amazed, I think. The remarking on Senegalese beauty, the tone of it, betrays a deep insecurity, a shock that the deepest and blackest part of us is really beautiful.” It calls to mind that in his final book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin unknowingly betrayed some internalized stereotypes about Black people. If Baldwin and Coates aren’t impervious to racism’s gaslighting, no one is.

The author also flies to Chapin, South Carolina, where he meets with Mary Wood, a white, middle-aged teacher who put her career in jeopardy by refusing to remove from her curriculum one of Coates’s earlier volumes, which has been placed in the nebulous category of “critical race theory” by right-wing opponents. He attends a school board meeting on the matter, though it’s attended mostly by Wood’s supporters and offers little clarity. Absent any encounter with the forces trying to silence the history of American racism, this section goes nowhere, registering as the weakest part of the book. Teachers and librarians targeted as enemies of the people deserve more than a pop-in visit that doesn’t extend beyond the author’s personal entanglement in the situation. (The best recent work on American democracy’s death by a thousand cuts remains Jeff Sharlet’s The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.)

The final and meatiest section concerns Coates’s trip to the Middle East. (The author refers to the state as “Palestine” rather than “Israel,” which clues you into the fullness of his political evolution.) A week and a half comparing the living situations of Palestinians and Israelis isn’t a great deal of time to learn about the dire situation, even when complemented by lots of book research. Given the difficulty of traveling in the area even before the October 7 attacks on Israelis, you can’t fault Coates for only managing a brief stay, but he should have maximized the value of his time by conducting some in-depth interviews. Lacking such dialogue, Coates becomes by default the main voice of Palestinians, even though he acknowledges he remains a novice on the subject. He writes: “Even my words here, this bid for reparation is a stranger’s story—one told by a man still dazzled by knafeh and Arabic coffee, still at the start of a journey that others have walked since birth…If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands.” Their hands have very little imprint on this book.

The clear lesson of the last decade has often been ignored by good citizens who don’t want to accept the truth: Most citizens of the country currently want something authoritarian and cruel.

No one in good faith can deny that bigotry, as much as fear of rising anti-Semitism, aided the establishment of Israel—Theodor Herzl referred to the Palestinian people as “barbarians” just as Roosevelt had Africans—or that Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinians has caused an ongoing humanitarian crisis. It’s a moral disaster, and it’s easy to see the parallels in the experiences of Black people in U.S. history. Coates views the story of the Israeli suppression of Palestinians as uncomplicated, and morally it is. Politically and practically, not so much.

Pro-Israeli critics of the book argue that the labyrinthine and often arbitrary checkpoint system that hems and hinders Palestinians is a cruel necessity to keep Hamas at bay. The violence of October 7 is a reminder that these were not unfounded fears. Of course, when you take a people’s land from them, they’re not likely to accept it peacefully. (If Coates is mostly focused on the region’s similarities with the Jim Crow South, you can also see the plight of Native Americans being repeated.) The continuing Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip since the Hamas attacks has caused unimaginable suffering, displacement, and death. It’s beyond a Hamlet-esque level of disproportionate response.

The writer doesn’t offer any solutions to the quagmire. It’s telling that if you suggest the best result would be a two-state solution that aims for a peaceful and secure Palestine and a peaceful and secure Israel, many people around the world would be infuriated, accepting only an all-or-nothing outcome. It’s undeniable that we’re living during a terrible spike of anti-Semitism globally that has little to do with the Middle East. This period is reminiscent of the beginnings of the so-called modern anti-Semitism movement that swept through Europe during the late 19th century. That wave made Herzl and others believe a Jewish state was necessary. (If only they would have suggested it be planted on an unoccupied piece of land.) Islamophobia is likewise having a moment, so much so that Palestinians who’ve been victimized by Hamas aren’t viewed any differently than their tormentors. These factors have made a combustible situation even more contentious.

It’s the day after the American Presidential election when I’m finishing writing this review. You already hear supposedly serious people explaining yet again that Americans at this moment are very noble and only need to be spoken to in a certain way to convince them to embrace goodness. But Trump voters aren’t misinformed, nor have they been entranced by a cult leader. The obvious lesson of the last decade has often escaped good citizens who don’t want to accept what’s happened: Most Americans in this era knowingly want something authoritarian and cruel. Blaming fascism on the fascists may not be a diplomatic thing to do, but reality remains important. “Art creates the possible of politics,” Coates writes. The art that created and has sustained Trump is both old and new. Confederate statues, Reality TV, the Internet, and manosphere podcasts all distort and resonate with those who want to retreat from progress. In our current media environment, lies have greater currency than facts. They’re transgressive and luridly entertaining, requiring no expertise. “Statues and pageantry can fool you,” Coates tells us, but it’s even worse when people aren’t fooled but wittingly choose the vile lies that serve them.•

The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story (Olga Tokarczuk)

A tubercular young man of no particular distinction arrives at a sanitarium in the mountains just before World War I, where he’s schooled in theories and philosophies by his supposedly more sophisticated fellow patients. That’s a bare-bones synopsis of Thomas Mann’s maddeningly inscrutable 1924 masterwork, The Magic Mountain, the German writer’s novel about the nature of time and existence (and everything else) in an era turned upside down by trench warfare and mustard gas, which demands re-readings even though it can be a slog. It also describes The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, Olga Tokarczuk’s feminist, genre-novel riff on Mann’s story, as the recent Nobelist takes on her predecessor. It’s not that The Magic Mountain is full of overtly sexist statements; like many classic novels, however—and many boardrooms and halls of power in the real world—it features men having discussions of great import with scant female input. The funny thing is that although Tokarczuk has stated that her work “retells” The Magic Mountain, it does so only barely—the two novels don’t share much beyond a basic outline.

If the writer doesn’t fully follow through on her stated goal, she goes all out to live up to the book’s subtitle. The Swiss Alps health spa that becomes a long-term home to Mann’s Hans Castorp is haunted, but its horrors are existential. Tokarczuk’s terrors are both metaphysical and something more directly menacing and pulpy. It’s acceptable to reimagine any idea in a new form. If Abraham Lincoln can be reborn as a vampire hunter, Magic Mountain is certainly a candidate to become a literary horror novel. The conceit, however, isn’t successful. The author’s enthusiasm for Victorian horror literature makes for some disquieting scenes, but the parts never add up. She loves the genre, but fandom isn’t enough. Truffaut never mastered the Hitchcockian despite ardent admiration for the British-American master of the vertiginous. Tokarczuk doesn’t deftly handle horror tropes in her novel despite previously showing a facility for horror-adjacent categories: the mystical madness of The Books of Jacob and the sharp execution of the thriller/fairy tale mashup Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Her new novel is convincingly atmospheric but ultimately a misfire— though I suspect her frustration with real-world politics is as much a cause as anything for her poor aim.

The creepy, metaphysical story jumps out to a strong start. Sickly Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, an erstwhile Polish engineering student who now dreams of becoming a beekeeper, arrives at the Silesian facility that has been “famous for decades as a mountain resort for those with chest complaints.” No bed is available in the main sanitarium, so the young man is housed in a smaller sister site that seems sinister from the start. It’s there that Wojnicz encounters his first cadaver. It’s not the body of one of his fellow patients. The young man wanders into an unlocked cabin and finds atop the table of a small dining room the stiff, lifeless body of the female employee who served him breakfast that morning. Wilhelm Opitz, the overseer of the Guesthouse for Gentleman, walks in on Wojnicz and his dead acquaintance and matter-of-factly explains that the woman hanged herself earlier in the day. He then bloodlessly shares that she was his wife. The scene is unsurprisingly jarring to Wojnicz, and things grow eerier later that night when Opitz serves a late dinner to him and some other male patients on the very table where his spouse’s corpse had been stretched out. A meat dish in thick gravy is the main course. Only a bare light bulb illuminates the meal. It seems the opposite of salubrious.

During such hearty meals and many chest-pounding hikes in the high altitude, the men frequently opine on women—and not in flattering terms. “It’s true, the female brain is quite simply smaller, and there’s no denying it when objective research has proved it,” one of the men says in the aftermath of the suicide. A slew of similarly reductive comments follow. If the pseudoscientific statements sound familiar, Tokarczuk reveals in an author’s note that each is a paraphrase of remarks made by A-list male writers, psychologists, and philosophers: Plato, Pound, Freud, Sartre, etc. A much-less esteemed thinker, Woynicz’s uncle, frequently offered a condemning refrain to him when he was a boy: “Woman, frog and devil, these are siblings treble.” Longin Lukas, a patient who is a Catholic traditionalist, asserts during a walk to a tavern with his brethren that a “woman’s body belongs not only to her but to mankind.” The author is in conversation with the present tense as well as the past. Tuberculosis isn’t the chief affliction Tokarczuk is treating. Misogyny is the more feverish ailment.

Wojnicz, who listens attentively to the woman-bashing but never joins in, befriends a weakly German art student named Thilo, who is sicker than the rest and seems to be on his deathbed anytime he reclines. His new friend begins to awaken our protagonist to shocking possibilities. He tells Wojnicz that he believes Opitz battered his wife regularly and harbors doubts that her death was a suicide. Thilo is forever feverish and hallucinating—“One sinks into a strange state of mind here,” he acknowledges—so Wojnicz isn’t sure how much to trust him. (That the men are constantly imbibing Schwärmerei, a liquor infused with a hallucinogenic property, doesn’t aid lucidity.) An older patient with TB reveals to Wojnicz that he’s an undercover police officer investigating the sanitarium while he undergoes treatment. The cop warns him about a ritualistic murder that takes place each autumn in the forest where a man is torn limb from limb—a killing that may have supernatural origins. He quietly tells the young man that he’s in danger, suggesting he might be next in line.

Even without these whispered bits of information, our slow-on-the-uptake central character would have likely figured out something was amiss. The signs are not subtle. The forests release horrible, blood-curdling screams—maybe it’s just stags during the rutting season but maybe not. Rabbits are frightened to death, so their hearts can be made into a stew. The patients come across crudely fashioned Tuntschi sex dolls created by the feral men known as “charcoal burners” who live in the forest. Most curious is that the village was a historical site of a 1600s witch-hunt hysteria that saw innocent women accused of evil magic burned and beheaded. Surviving females fled to the forest and their spirits supposedly still exist there, hungry for revenge. The title is a word coined by the author from “Empusa,” the name for a Greek mythological figure who’s a demonic, female shape-shifter.

There’s a major reveal with Wojnicz that may not be a surprise since the hints are not subtle, and the answer to the annual forest murder arrives without any chills. Tokarczuk was driven to write the book not just by the sexist literary and scientific slights of the past but also by present-tense politics. Empusium is a reaction to the far-right nationalism that has taken hold in Europe and America in the last decade. While writing this book in her native Poland, the country’s democracy was being degraded by the conservative populist Law and Justice party, which cares little for law or justice. (The party’s eight-year rule didn’t end until a total abortion ban tipped the scales in 2023.) The novelist saw her book as a way to stand up against the retrograde legislators harming women and LGBTQ people, but her storytelling is heavy-handed. In one scene, Thilo encourages Wojnicz to train his eyes as intensely as possible on a Henri Bles painting so that he can see it from different perspectives. “The most interesting things are in the shadows, in the invisible,” he tells his friend. Tokarczuk’s fury prevents her from seeing her subjects from different angles and creating fully formed characters. Anger, even justifiable anger, can sometimes overwhelm art.•