The disease, in the pauses that sometimes give the sufferings, usually drive to memory and reflection, at least showed it Thomas Mann in “The magic mountain”novel that was key so that in 1929 the Nobel Prize will conquer. Mann He considered that this “authority enlarged over time” is a Bildungsromanthe story of the protagonist’s formation. A century later, the Polish writer Olga Tokarczukafter obtaining in 2018 the Nobel Prize for Literature, decided in “Earth of Empusas” review “The magic mountain” From a political perspective of gender, magical realism and terror.
Everything happens shortly before the first war. As in Mann A young engineering student arrives at a sanatorium for tuberculous. How there is no place in the Hospital of Dr. Semperweiss, the student will live in a pension where a group of men, while waiting to be cured by the “healing air” argue about politics, philosophy, religion and women. The character of Mann He makes his learning and maturation there. The one of Tokarczuk He supports heated and sentencing discussions that conclude in patriarchal and misogynistic agreements. (At the end of the novel it will be known that phrases against women belong to Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, Sartreamong others, something that Argentine feminists have already used to show the permanence of machismo).
As Tokarczuk She is a great narrator does not stay there. The sinister begins to grow slowly. Set aside “The magic mountain”. Wilhelm Opitz, owner of the pension, is a palurdo. Just her fourth woman, Klara hangs himself, buries her, but she in some disturbing way stays in the house. The controntulations accompany their disputes with a lucin of hallucinatory fungi. Centuries ago there were burned witches and to escape the hunting the women of the town escaped to the forest and nothing more of them was known. Now in the forest there are coalgers and libators, who build with straw, firewood and leaves “tuntschis”, dolls with which they have sex.
The tuntschis once a year come alive and lives are charged. They are the empusas, female spectra, which according to the Greeks mutate in seductive devouring men. There is a precise date that happens. The cemetery gives testimony. Before a carbon disappeared, now someone from the town, from the sanatorium. A group decides to deliver a man to save the rest. The engineering student has discovered too many things, and has not hidden at all the secret that pursues him since his birth and will lead him to transform. “The Earth of the Empusas” charges another dimension, offers new interpretations to what was read, discovers that the story that has been read has been often narrated by a mysterious force that lives in the forest, by “that enigmatic we have always remains.”
“Earth of Empusas” He received the European Literature Award 2024.
*Olga Tokarczuk, “Earth of Empusas” (Bs.AS., Anagrama, 2025, 341 pages)
Feel, know and count
La Machona, La Marimacho, the blonde girl queen of the Buenos Aires bars that were worship and today are pizzerias, which sometimes wanted to mix from Alfonsina, Norah Lange And why not, Sara Gallardothe drinker who arrived at Black Out, the journalist who adding teachers achieved a unique voice, now speaks of the decline, of the stage that is “between dying and lasting”, in a book that confirms that her narrative quality, the daring fusion of the culteran and the plebeian, has not diminished.
The literary testimonies of the course of a disease are multiple and varied, María Moreno He does not concessions, his book is not self -help and overcoming, it is drastic in the haughtiness and melancholy. With some sentimental dovetera makes a prologue where he remembers men who loved or did not love and those who did to his formation. He concludes: “Now everyone has died and me, there is only half.”
On July 3, 2021, a stroke caused paralysis of the right side of the body, from the face to the foot. What happened to various forms, as if edited versions. Perhaps the most shocking is when you are writing, you feel the first symptoms of stroke, get up to ask for help, to leave the door open, go back to the computer, complete the written, run to the phone, leave a message to my son, “precise and brief.” And the stroke “started again.”
It is very hard no longer to have the right hand, even more so for who is its main tool. And she from adolescence became a journalist, who was later adding the novelist (“Affair Skeffington”), The author of non -fiction (“The orejudo petiso”) and a dozen essay books, chronicle and interviews, among them “Black out”, Winner of the Critics Award of the Book Fair and considered by The New York Times one of the books of 2016. He had previously won the Guggenheim scholarship, and recently the brilliant Konex last year.
He maintains that part of his work is based on “libraries and memories.” In “The Merma”describes her hospitalization, the rehabilitation stages, the orders to friends of yesterday to help her at once, the teaching and domestication of the left hand, the imperative need to write. It is not repressed and puts intimacy to the naked, of the discomfort and intestinal pleasures to the experience of the payment. Next to that there are miniensayos where he activates the philosophical, ironic, scathing, or the interviewer who seeks in the digital world to know how others have prosecuted “living with a prosthesis. The hardness without concessions of the end of “the mere” is contrasted with the many other things that he suggests that he still has to count and put the reader waiting.
María Moreno “La Merma” (Bs. As., Random House, 2025, 159 pages)
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
