Strictly speaking, neither of the two are spa resorts. Tokarczuk’s novel is about a sanatorium in the Sudeten Mountains, while Tove Jannson’s book is set in a retirement community in Florida. But the way they describe the towns and their residents, who all know each other, makes this feel very much like a spa resort with long-term residents, and Tokarczuk herself calls it a health resort in the subtitle of her book.
Tove Jansson: Sun City, transl. Thomas Teal, Random House, 1976 (published in Finland in 1974)
A sun city is the official name of a town in the southern United States where sunshine is guaranteed all year round, like Florida, hence why it’s become so popular with people in retirement. This is an unusual departure for Jansson, her only novel for adults set outside Finland, but underneath the tongue-in-cheek humorous descriptions of small-town America and the people who inhabit it, there is a streak of sadness.
Unlike The Empusium, this book is set in the present-day – or at least the present-day at the time of writing in the early 1970s, but there is a timeless quality to the story. The imaginary St Petersburg in Florida is a pleasant if somewhat dull place, where the weather is always warm, the houses wooden, and there are rocking chairs on the veranda all year round, where the old people sit and chat and watch the world go by.
We are invited in to one of these guesthouses with verandas, namely The Berkeley Arms, and we get to know the people who live or work there. It’s always a challenge to remember so many different characters when they’re introduced in rapid succession, but Jansson does a good job of moving from one POV to another and making us see the characters from within, as well as how other people might perceive them.
We are introduced to the obnoxious Mr Thompson, who pretends to be deaf when it suits him, the wealthy and rude Mrs Rubinstein, the Pihalga sisters deeply engrossed in their books, the overly anxious, mousey little Miss Peabody, the secretive and dreamy Mrs Morris, good-natured Mrs Higgins with fourteen grandchildren, Miss Frey who is the administrator of the guesthouse but no spring chicken herself. And then there are two younger people, Linda the housekeeper and her lover Joe, who does the deliveries every day on his motorbike.
We assist in their walks, afternoon teas, squabbles on the veranda, we even go into their rooms and examine their souvenirs and keepsakes. We realise that Mrs Rubinstein is actually unable to communicate truthfully with her son. Joe has become involved with the ‘Jesus freaks’, is convinced the end of the world is night, and is waiting for a letter from them so that he can join them in the jungle further south (in an eerie foreshadowing of the Jonestown massacre which took place a few years after the book was published). When aged, once-famous crooner Tim Tellerton comes to town, Miss Peabody reveals her hero-worshipping fantasies and does her best to get him to come to the Spring Ball.
Nothing much happens and yet everything happens. No one is allowed to swap rocking chairs on the veranda, until someone leaves them empty (by moving away, or, more likely, by dying). Two of the old people die yet their chairs remain empty. Any dramatic altercations leave a bit of a grudge behind, but are then forgotten about. People get their hair done and get excited about the Spring Ball. An estranged spouse turns up and then disappears again. And it’s only toward the end of the book, when most of the residents take a trip to Silver Springs resort with its Bambi’s Playground amusement park, that things take on a slightly sinister, inexplicable turn. Suddenly, we seem to be transported into the illogical, fantastical world of Moominland, but for those left back at the guesthouse, not much has changed.
Is this is a vision of a sort of purgatory where people in their old age hang around and try to keep themselves busy while waiting for death? In any case, Jansson is so good at portraying that enclosed and sheltered little world of a retirement community, and giving us pen portraits of older people that don’t lump them all into an undifferentiated mass of bores and nuisances, or else idealised visions of generosity and wisdom. Instead, older people with distinctive voices and a wide range of conflicting emotions: some are still full of fears and doubts, others experience deep emotional and physical passion, while most of them are able to foster petty grudges and games of one-upmanship.
While the writing is not quite as subtle and poetic as in her novels and stories set in Finland, I still enjoyed the occasional zinging sentences and paragraphs, the dialogue that has all the faux-innocent vibe of the Moomins, for example in this conversation between newcomer Mrs Morris and two more established residents:
‘If you want to dance,’ said Peabody, ‘did I already tell you that if you want to dance the best thing is to sit on one of the benches right at the front? Then they know what you want.’
‘Who does?’
‘The gentlemen.’
‘And where do the gentlemen sit?’ Mrs Morris asked.
‘They circulate. There aren’t so many of them…’
‘They’re all dead,’ Thompson explained.
Certain people like Mrs Rubinstein, who won’t allow themselves to admit to any weakness, like to joke about old age, for instance about the plans for dancing at the Spring Ball.
I have an idea… Why not divide up the space according to the members’ health? One ballroom for those who can’t take air and another for those who can’t take smoke? One ballroom with slow tangos and dim lighting for those with bad hearts and wrinkled decolletage, and another one with fluorescent lights and pop music for the ones with poor eyesight and hearing?
But the genuine fear of uncertainty and death makes itself felt every now and then, and sure enough, something does happen on the dancefloor at the Spring Ball.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, it takes sensible Mrs Morris to reassure nervous Miss Peabody:
As far as I can see there’s only one thing to worry about, and that’s not to scare people when you die, and not to give them a bad conscience. Considering what a spectacle we make of ourselves while we’re alive, we might at least try to achieve some dignity when the whole thing’s over. Miss Peabody, you can sleep quite easily. Please turn out the light as you leave…
But we also get a bit of insight into the minds of younger people through Linda and Joe. Although Linda is generally quite patient and forgiving with the residents, there’s a clear generation gap between Joe and Tim Tellerton:
‘So you’re back to that,’ Joe yelled. ‘Making! Becoming! I don’t want to become, I want to be. You’re talking about a world that ended a long time ago and doesn’t mean a thing any more. All that stuff about becoming and making and owning.’
‘You own a motorcycle,’ said Tellerton sharply.
‘… You can’t own a Honda. Can you own 120 miles an hour? Speed, class – those aren’t possessions… You people won things a whole different way… you collect things. Admiration, titles, higher pay – things. Wall to wall carpets. Being famous… You’ve made the world a terrible place to live in…’
Tellerton interrupted him. ‘I recognize all that. I’ve heard all that before.’
It’s the observational skills and the willingness to hear all the voices, with a critical eye but also with a lot of compassion, that I admire so much in Jansson’s work. This may not be her most accomplished and endearing novel, but it is still full of her bountiful spirit.
Olga Tokarczuk: The Empusium. A Health Resort Horror Story, transl. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024
This is very much Magic Mountain territory, and there are many parallels to Thomas Mann’s book (probably more than I could remember, not having reread The Magic Mountain recently). It is set shortly before the First World War, at the first sanatorium for TB patients in the world, in what is now Silesia, Poland: Sokołowsko (Görbersdorf in those days and in the book) close to present-day Wałbrzych (Waldenburg in the book). It really was founded by a Dr Brehmer back in 1859, as explained in the book, who had a new approach to curing TB, and it became so famous that the Davos establishment described in The Magic Mountain was built to resemble it. By the 1930s, however, it lost its shine and is now largely in ruins.
The newcomer in this situation is the student Micezyslaw Wojnicz from Lwow, and he is first housed in a guesthouse for gentlemen, while waiting for a free spot in the main building of the sanatorium or Kurhaus. Once again we are introduced to a colourful cast of characters (and luckily they are all listed at the beginning of the book, so you can keep going back to check who’s who): Opitz the owner of the guesthouse, who insists he is Swiss and has been married four times; a seriously ill student from Berlin Thilo von Hahn; verbose August August who has socialist tendencies; Longin Lukas, overfond of alcohol and women but speaking very disparagingly of the latter; Walter Frommer with his stiff attitude and traditionalist ideas; Dr Semperweiss who is treating all of them and is very into psychoanalysis; and a mysterious woman in a large hat that Wojnicz keeps catching glimpses of around town.
But it’s not all fun and games and philosophical debates sprinkled with blatant misogyny. Things start taking a turn for the sinister almost right away. First, Mrs Opitz is found hanging from a beam. Then Wojnicz notices that in the cemetery in the neighbouring village (no nasty reminders of death at the sanatorium itself) all of the gravestones seem to show dates of death in the month of November. Odd noises can be heard at night – from the attic and from a stag mating. And then there are the Tuntschi, the bizarre recumbent dolls made of moss, sticks, dry pine needles and rotten wood, made by the charcoal burners to satisfy their need for female companionship while they are working far away from home. ‘Male desire must be instantly satisfied, otherwise the world would collapse in chaos.’
Yet just like the robots that men are making today, there are questions to be asked: at what point do these ‘creations’ become sentient? In Tokarczuk’s novel there’s a magical twist, and hints are dropped that these Tuntschi are actually watching the humans – perhaps even taking revenge on them. The horror in the story is of a genteel literary nature, allusive rather than full-blown gore, although it does get more frenetic towards the end, and it’s handled in language that feels very appropriate for the timeframe described in the early 1910s.
The ‘locker-room’ talk of the men might seem more frustrating, as the one thing they seem to agree upon is the inferiority of women, whom they mock and despise. Part of it was very normal for that time period (the author mentions at the end that she borrowed all the ideas from a number of famous philosophers and authors). What makes it more disturbing, however, is that it doesn’t sound all that different from the furious outbursts on present-day incel forums and their occasional overflow into mainstream social media. I rather liked the heavy sarcasm that the author uses to handle these. In fact, there is a dark comedic seam throughout the novel, which keeps it entertaining throughout, although it can also be read in a number of deeper ways. The authors draws clear parallels with contemporary issues and attitudes, and the frightening return to conservative rhetoric and inflexible traditionalism.
Yet all of these highly-vaunted rational and traditional values are undone in the book by the messy darkness that creeps into the landscape… and by the end it all descends into a bit of chaos, just like in Tove Jansson’s book. A preoccupation with ecology and nature taking its revenge on humans to a greater or lesser extent is a running theme in Tokarczuk’s novels.
Let me finish with a few choice passages, translated with customary elegance and finesse by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Here’s a bit about Wojnicz’s parents:
His father believed that the blame for both national disasters and educational failures lay with a soft upbringing that encouraged girlishness, mawkishness and passivity, nowadays fashionably termed ‘individualism’. He did not approve. What counted were manliness, energy, social work for the public good, rationalism, pragmatism. He was especially fond of the word ‘pragmatism’.
…the death of his wife had permanently destroyed his trust in the fair sex… She had given birth and promptly died! What a nerve!… The older Wojnicz’s mother had passed away prematurely too. There was something wrong with these mothers; it was as if they did a terribly dangerous job, risking their lives in boudoirs and bedrooms, tangled in lace, leading a lethal existence among the bedclothes and copper pans, among the towels, powders and stacks of menus for every day of the year.
I also enjoyed the description of people’s heritage, which was so complicated in that part of Europe with constantly changing borders and a mix of ethnicities living together. Here is August describing his background:
‘My father was an Austrian official, but he was born in Jassy [Romania]. My mother was from Bukovina [present-day Romania and Ukraine], but she was Austrian. Though what does that mean, when her parents had estates in Hungary and felt themselves to be Hungarian. And in my turn I am… it’s hard to say. In terms of language, I think in German and Romanian. And in French, of course, like every European.’
He regarded the fashion for nation states as transitory and believed it would end badly: the artificial division of people according to such feeble categories as the place where they were born did not suit the complexity of the question of identité.
Above all, I enjoyed the frank perorations of Dr Semperweiss, who seems both laid-back but also clear-sighted about everyone’s foibles, although of course he too sees women as the weaker psyche (he is, after all, a Freudian).
Each of us is a potential lunatic, young man. Fantasizing is the norm. Each of us sits astride the border of our own inner world and the outer one, balancing dangerously. It’s a very uncomfortable position, and not many succeed in maintaining their equilibrium.
I very much enjoyed these two forays into wellness (or should that be illness?) culture, and it will be hard to return to French February after this, although I have two (hopefully entertaining) crime novels planned next.
findingtimetowrite 