"Raphaela Edelbauer's impressive debut novel is a subtle allegory of
historical memory and collective guilt, combining a dreamy, gothic
strangeness ..."--The Guardian
"A village that officially does not exist and that seems to be
disappearing more and more ... Anyone who embarks on this trip is safely
guided by Edelbauer--on a fine line between madness and
adventure."--Christina Risken, Buchhandlung Krüger
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 realize 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.
