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Patriarchal horror
The title of The Empusium, the newly translated work by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is an invention. It is a portmanteau that fuses masculine and feminine literary allusions: first, Plato’s Symposium, which tells of a drunken Athenian banquet in which great statesmen give speeches on the nature of love; second, the empusa, a shape-shifting female demon who, according to Greek mythology, had the sirenic ability to lure and prey upon young men.
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The Empusium: A health report horror story
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Text Publishing, $34.99 pb, 320 pp
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