Kaska Bryla: Die Eistaucher

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Ice Divers. Novel.
Vienna: Residenz, 2022.
320 pages; hardcover; €24.
ISBN 978 3 7017 17514.

Kaska Bryla

Excerpt

Everything can be used
except what is wasteful
you will need
to remember this when accused of destruction

Audre Lorde*

Deep under the ice rests the soul of the world

Love and betrayal, destruction and guilt are at the dark center of this novel, which begins in ostensible innocence at a Catholic private school in Vienna and ends twenty years later at a campground in a Polish nature reserve. Saša lives with his memories and the hills, the woods, wild animals, and graves along the border until a mysterious stranger appears and starts asking questions, setting the narrative in motion.

Saša’s perspective opens the novel, which is in the form of a countdown: fragmented memories in nine chapters numbered backwards approach the day that set the world of a group of young friends on fire. A second narrative runs in the other direction, also in nine chapters, and presents the exploits of the teenagers from multiple viewpoints. Their voices meld into a collective stream of conscience in which you can lose yourself while reading, although each character is inimitable.

We first meet Iga, the skateboarder, on her way to her new school, then beautiful Jess, and chubby Rasputin, who goes by Ras. They are outsiders in their class, but together they form a sworn circle, the inseparable Ice Divers. Ras suggested the name and Iga and Jess adopted it. "Diving under the ice. Getting something out from under the ice" – that fits them (303). When the three friends witness brutal police abuse and face an abyss that leaves them impotent and angry, they decide to take the law into their own hands. "No one has the right to obey," Jess says, "we have a responsibility."

As in her first novel, Roter Affe (Red Monkey), Kaska Bryla interweaves a gripping crime story with socio-political and moral questions, making a fiery appeal for solidarity, friendship, and love. "I believe the only way I can think is in collective groups," is one of the most-cited lines of the author, who situates her novels in her own lifeworld. "Homosexuality, a queer background, characters from marginalized groups – all come from who I am, how I live, what surrounds me. It’s my normality and the normality of many people."

Kaska Bryla, who grew up in Vienna and Warsaw, shines a bright light on the meaning of migration and class difference for her young heroes.
Questions of community and dependency are omnipresent, her characters’ scope of action is clearly determined by how much they have to lose. The children should have it better one day, expectations of them are high. "Bullet-proof," is how Ras’ father would put it. "In this world you need to be bullet-proof. Like a German Shepard in the war. Otherwise you’re weeded out" (58).

The multiple perspectives and the characters’ strong energy make Die Eistaucher thrilling to the end – a page-turner that you read in one go and then again, slowly, because there’s so much more to it.
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* "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" by Audre Lorde,
in: Sister/Outsider, 1984
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From the review by Sabine Schuster, 1 March 2022
Translation by Laura Radosh

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