2021 translation by Jen Calleja
A book club discussion of The Liquid Land / Das flüssige Land (2019) by Raphael Edelbauer, translated into English by Jen Calleja in 2021
Read and discuss works by German authors in this series hosted by the Goethe-Institut Washington. All books can be read in English translation or in the German original; our discussion will be in English.
Please Note: In order to participate in the online discussion (carried out over Zoom), registrants must obtain access to the novel on their own. Hard copies of the novel can be ordered through multiple vendors online; the eBook is also available for download to Kindle, iPad, and other digital reading platforms.
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Das flüssige Land / The Liquid Land, by Raphaela Edelbauer
A town that doesn’t want to be found. A countess who rules over the memories of an entire community. A hole in the earth that threatens to drag them all into its depths.
When her parents die in a car accident, the highly talented physicist Ruth Schwarz is confronted with an almost intractable problem. Her parents’ will calls for them to be buried in their childhood home — but for strangers, Gross-Einland is a village that remains stubbornly hidden from view.
When Ruth finally finds her way there, she makes a disturbing discovery: beneath the town lies a vast cavern that seems to exert a strange control over the lives of the villagers. There are hidden clues about the hole everywhere, but nobody wants to talk about it — not even when it becomes clear that the stability of the entire town is in jeopardy. Is this silence controlled by the charming countess who rules the community? And what role does Ruth’s family history, a history she is only just beginning to uncover, have to play?
The more questions Ruth asks, the more vehement the resistance she encounters from the residents. But as she continues to dig deeper, she comes to realise that the key to deciphering the mysterious codes of the people of Gross-Einland can only lie in the history of the hole.
In the literary tradition of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, Raphaela Edelbauer weaves the complexities of small-town social structures into an opaque dream fabric that is frighteningly true to life, and in the process she turns us towards the abject horror that lies beneath repressed memory. The Liquid Land is a dangerous novel, at once glittering nightmare and dark reality, from an extraordinary new literary voice.
Source:
Scribe Publications
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Raphaela Edelbauer was born in Vienna in 1990. She studied Language Art (
Sprachkunst) with Robert Schindel at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
The Liquid Land was published by Klett-Cotta in 2019, and was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and longlisted for the Austrian Book Prize.
Jen Calleja is a British writer and literary translator. She’s the author of
I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For (Prototype),
Goblins (Rough Trade Books), and
Serious Justice (Test Centre). Her translations from German include the work of Marion Poschmann, Wim Wenders, Kerstin Hensel, Michelle Steinbeck, and Gregor Hens. Her translation of
The Pine Islands was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019.
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Discussion of the novel will take place virtually via Zoom on Tuesday, May 17, at 6:30pm Eastern. Please RSVP via Eventbrite in order to receive discussion prompts and the Zoom invite link.
Discussion prompts from the facilitator (facilitator TBA) will be emailed to all participants RSVP'd via Eventbrite in advance of the discussion. The Zoom invite and additional directions/tips for accessing the Zoom discussion will be emailed to all participants no less than 48 hours before the discussion begins. The discussion will take place in English.
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