Raphaela Edelbauer: Das flüssige Land.

The fluid Land.
Novel.
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2019.
ISBN: 978-3-608-96436-3.

(This dossier does not include a reading sample because the English translation rights have already been sold.)

After her parents die in an accident, Ruth, a Viennese physicist, faces a nearly irresolvable paradox. Their last wishes are to be buried in the town where they were raised, but Gross-Einland is stubbornly closed off to outsiders. When Ruth finally arrives there, she makes an astonishing discovery. An enormous, sprawling cavern beneath the town seems to be shaping the lives of Gross-Einland’s residents. Many clues about the cave and its variable history are hidden in plain sight, but no one wants to talk about it. Not even when it becomes apparent that the entire town is at risk of collapsing.

For all the enigmas of the cavern itself, the greater incongruities come from the ways the townspeople approach it. At most, they gossip about it in hushed tones, but in public the topic is simply glossed over or avoided altogether. Is the influential local countess enforcing this code of silence? And what is the role of Ruth’s own family history? What is the secret of this hole in the ground, which seems to be bearing the burden of a great guilt—or perhaps to be a physical embodiment of the guilt itself? Ruth soon figures out that the enigma of these local geological features cannot be deciphered without knowing their history. The further she digs into the complexities of the onetime Nazi rule in Gross-Einland, the more forcefully the residents resist her efforts.

Raphaela Edelbauer has created an impressive, ambitious, and potent metaphor for the unspeakable. The author herself comes from the town of Hinterbrühl, which was the site of a satellite concentration camp until 1944. Its underground lake and cave system bears a subterranean parallel to the fictional Gross-Einland.

Edelbauer studied language arts and philosophy, which might explain the unusual theoretical substrate on which the book rests. In addition, it includes the aboriginal Australian concept of Dreamtime, through which we the living can make contact with our ancestors. What our ancestors do in the Dreamtime shapes our world, and more specifically our landscape. We in turn can alter the Dreamtime through our own actions. “All around us, the landscape [flows] just like our perceptions—it’s all cast from the same mold. Thus, in fact, the entire world becomes metaphor.”

Even if the book leaves you hanging with a question mark or two, your head will keep processing it—whether you’ve spent days, weeks, or months absorbed in its pages.

Based on the review by Katia Schwingshandl from August 28, 2019
English translation by Jake Schneider

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