Malé

Longlisted for the German Book Prize 2020
Roman Ehrlich has written an edgy climate dystopia: No, there's no war in which people are battling for the last remaining resources; instead, there is a bunch of dropouts and adventurers from all over the world who travel to Malé, the capital of the Maldives, to witness the atolls drowning in the floods of the Indian Ocean. While the waters are rising, they are making plans for the future, tell stories, take drugs, and look down upon past generations (yes, guys, those people are us). On the shoreline, militias patrol with a luxury cruiseship, a relict of the old times of mass tourism, and they trade goods with and produce drugs for the international visitors.

Water, decay and doom are the setting in which the vast cast of characters exchange stories, dreams, visions, fears. People disappear in the disappearing city and are sought after, causes of death become metaphors, and it appears less and less certain what's more relentless: The rising waters or the character's determination to enjoy this mixture of angst and spectacle. What remains very dry is the language, it's almost like a matter-of-fact account of events - the narrator is the one remaining clear-sighted while recording, but not explaining!, events.

And thus the whole book becomes a puzzle of stories and motives: The moon appears again and again, we are shown maps, there's the blue flower of German romanticism popping up etc. But as this is the record of the world turning into ruins, the rubble cannot be put together again into a coherent whole. The world stops making sense as fact and fiction collapse into each other.

So in case someone didn't notice yet: This is a challenging text, Ehrlich makes his readers work and ponder and puzzle. I was quite surprised that some people found rather accessible texts like Serpentinen already too challenging (oh no, there are time jumps! How confusing! *sigh*), so if you have low tolerance for postmodern narrative games and ambiguity, stay away from "Malé". But the jury made a good call to nominate the book, of course: This is young, complex, and daring, this is a text that wants to be arty and smart and gives zero fucks about pandering to popular taste. Kudos, Roman Ehrlich.

You can learn more about the book in my radio piece and the Papierstau Podcast Book Prize Battle Royale #3.

Ein Buch das ich mit grosser Verwunderung gelesen und doch nie ganz verstanden habe. Eine Zukunftsgeschichte, die auf den langsam versinkenden Malediven spielt, wo fast nur noch Aussteiger aus aller Welt in einer komischen Hierarchie leben und irgendwie nach doch noch etwas suchen...

Ich war etwas irritiert von der Lektüre und konnte an manchen Stellen nicht so leicht in den Text hineinfallen. Und doch fand ich die Botschaft wichtig, das Szenario denkbar (was ziemlich beunruhigend wirkte).
Die anspielungsreiche Sprache und Eigenwilligkeit der Herangehensweise hielten mich weiterhin gespannt am Text fest und boten ein Leseerlebnis der besonderen Art. ich freue mich schon jetzt auf weitere Werke dieses jungen Autors.