Resort settings, such as spas, sanatoria, and wellness retreats have long beguiled creative authors with their narrative possibilities. Though distinct, each setting features a captive audience of diverse (and diversely motivated) characters who, in their ostensible commitment to a kind of personal attainment, are also committed to sharing overlapping space and time in pursuit of this goal. As stays in health resorts have historically been of some duration, lasting from several weeks to months (even years in some cases), the characters in these venues have ample time to experiment not only with their daily routines and approaches to health, but also with their romantic attachments, sexualities, and the very core of their personal identities. The semi-closed nature of the health resort—it is both connected to the outside world and estranged from it—allows for tantalizing narrative ambiguity: will the changes (and scandals) wrought inside the health resort resonate in the world beyond, or are they necessarily separate from it? And as readers, what do we ultimately make of this uncertainty?

In this connection, Astrid Köhler and Henrike Schmidt’s meticulously researched and groundbreaking work The Health Resort in Modern European Literature: Transnational Trajectories challenges us to reconsider the meaning of the resort text in the contemporary world. As the study’s title attests, its remit stretches beyond the albeit fluid borders of the Slavic and east European literary traditions to establish the resort text as a transnational European cultural phenomenon. The book’s structure is thematic rather than strictly chronological; however, we can say that the period of time under scrutiny is roughly from the first half of the nineteenth century, when spa travel guides and spa novels made their intertwined debuts, through today’s self-optimizing wellness craze as reflected not only in fiction but also in personal essays and immersive drama. As the nineteenth century resort text has received the most scholarly attention to date, the present study prioritizes twentieth and twenty-first century creative works in order to demonstrate the health resort’s enduring resonance. Though Köhler and Schmidt frame the discussion by including some of the most well-known authors in this genre, such as Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov, and Thomas Mann, they devote far more of their considerable energies to investigating understudied literatures and authors, including those writing in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. Moreover, quotations from all texts originally written in languages other than English are provided both in the original and in English translation.

The authors note that, in total, they have gathered a compendium of 230 texts by 120 authors from twenty different European languages and literatures on health resorts. The creation of such a multinational and multilingual body of texts is in and of itself a substantial scholarly achievement, especially when we consider that previously each kind of health retreat was treated as belonging to a separate narrative category that was further compartmentalized into national or ethnic literatures rather than as constituting a broader intercultural phenomenon. As a tremendous boon to future research endeavors, the full list of this corpus is given in Part I of the book’s bibliography. Translations into English, where available, are likewise referenced, and a list of related multimedia projects, websites, and links to interactive events offered by health resorts are also provided.

A major strength of the book is that it is open access and thus speaks to similar notions of freedom and accessibility that many of the artists whose work is under investigation interrogate. Open access also allows for a tailored reading experience, which Köhler and Schmidt have taken to heart: they have constructed a total of nine body chapters, which each provide a strong contribution, along with an Introduction and a Conclusion (Ch. 10). The Introduction both entices readers by previewing some of the most intriguing works that the coming pages will probe further and lays out the study’s theoretical framework. Here Köhler and Schmidt elucidate their overarching goal of expanding the “topos of the health resort in European literature” (3) beyond its usual suspects and time spaces. In so doing, they aim to demonstrate that the varied health retreats—thermal, mineral, seaside, and climatic spas, wellness centers, and sanatoria, which they group under the dynamic category of the resort narrative—comprise “a common imaginary space” (3). The authors contend that these locales are experienced as Foucauldian “other places” or “heterotopias” (3), which allows us to understand the health resort as possessing a dual nature: it is a space for pleasure, rest, and healing, but also for discipline, surveillance, and control. Fundamental, too, are the work of Roland Barthes, who himself spent time in a sanatorium seeking a cure for tuberculosis, and that of Gilles Deleuze, whose concept of the “disciplinary society” (11) reveals how the locus of health control has lately shifted from external authorities such as physicians and institutions to personal and digital sources. Against this background, Köhler and Schmidt successfully argue in subsequent chapters how the resort is transformed into a metaphor that may be applied to European society as a whole.

The first three chapters provide a foundational look at resort narratives and chart how they migrate from relaxing spa environments to the more regulated emplotment of the sanatorium. Though these chapters discuss well-known authors, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Guy de Maupassant, they nonetheless yield fresh insight into the ways in which literary and health practices shape each other. Chapter 4 then opens a new phase of the study to examine how authors across time and space have talked back to iconic spa and sanatorium narratives. Taking Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” as source texts, this chapter investigates contemporary correctives to these male-dominated (Mann) and Russocentric (Chekhov) prototypes. Of particular note here are Köhler and Schmidt’s analyses of Olga Tokarczuk’s feminist recasting of The Magic Mountain in her 2022 novel The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story and Serhii Zhadan’s Crimean counternarrative “Post-Soviet Paradises” from 2008. As this chapter indicates, there is a negative side to the resort narrative, which the next part of the study highlights in more detail. Chapters 5–7 focus on the seedy underbelly of the resort narrative and explore how wellness spaces became sites to enact control, trauma, and reflective nostalgia (in the formulation of Svetlana Boym, 152), respectively. Careful examination of works such as Mircea Cartarescu’s Solenoid and Dejan Tiago-Stankovic’s Estoril: A War Novel uncovers these hidden histories. In so doing, Köhler and Schmidt provoke their readers to consider what, if any, potential avenues for healing are available for survivors.

The last two body chapters, 8 and 9, turn to popular fiction, graphic novels, games, and social media to shed light on how contemporary forms of consumer entertainment (re)appropriate the resort narrative. Köhler and Schmidt’s sections on Dubravka Ugresic’s “pan-Slavic spa novel” (201) Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and her photo essay “There’s Nothing Here!” stand out for their provocative explorations of Ugresic’s resort settings as microcosms of the post-communist European economy. Finally, the Conclusion performs the welcome task of not only tying up loose ends but also identifying new directions for research in health storytelling. The authors note that “there is no end in sight” (220) in terms of resort narratives or their interpretations, and they have certainly equipped scholars with an impressive toolkit for future inquiry.

As may be expected, there are some challenges associated with composing an academic volume that incorporates many languages and literatures concurrently. One drawback of working with such an extensive textual corpus is that there is simply not enough space in one scholarly monograph to do each work justice. For example, novels such as Stanislaw Lem’s Hospital of the Transfiguration and Tanya Malyarchuk’s Oblivion would merit deeper and more thorough analysis regarding their engagement with the resort narrative. We must hope that Köhler and Schmidt’s readers will take their excellent beginning and expand upon it. Another hitch is that, with so many linguistic and literary norms to be responsible for, some errors may creep in that more careful editing is needed to address. In addition to typos and misspellings, there are some misused geographical formulations in English and awkward phrasing. Also, some well-known literary works are given titles in English that do not correspond to their usual translations, which could cause confusion.

These minor infelicities notwithstanding, The Health Resort in Modern European Literature marks a significant contribution to medical humanities scholarship writ large. Köhler and Schmidt’s pathbreaking work will surely inspire generations of scholars working at the intersections of literature and wellness, not just in the European context but worldwide. It will also prove invaluable for public health advocates, policy makers, and general readers, as well as anyone who is interested not only in literary and cultural production but also in the ways modern healthcare influences our physical, psychological, and moral wellbeing.