Malé - Roman Ehrlich

Ankle-deep water laps gently through the streets of a near-future Malé, formerly the capital of the Maldives. In its few bars and hotels, strangers gather to share stories, a literature scholar follows the trail of a missing poet, the father of a world-famous actor searches for his lost daughter, a daughter who may or may not be dead. The last stragglers on an island all but destroyed by climate change are the misfits, the forgotten and the lost, each with their own reason for running towards, or away from, something important in their lives.

Malé by Roman Ehrlich, which gained a well-deserved place on the 2020 German Book Prize longlist, is a melancholy, quiet, and shamelessly literary book. With just the bare bones of a plot, the novel focusses instead on the transient relationships between the characters, the strange workings of the human mind when it believes it has nothing—or everything—to lose, and the slow, sorrowful atmosphere of this once-beautiful landscape ravaged by man-made destruction.

Throughout, Ehrlich uses repeated linguistic motifs to mirror the endless, cyclical lapping of the waves around the island, enclosing the characters in water and words alike. The prose is the absolute highlight of the novel—gentle and often sparing, yet also both playful and poignant.

“The boy Kröcher looks out at the see and does not feel it to be dangerous or threatening or bad. It is the purest, remotest presence, proudly in the present, inherently right, untouched, a mirror to the universe in the dark of night, a deep world, a shaded part of the Earth. The boy on the harbour wall feels the surging of colossal kelp forests, unfathomably and limitlessly wide, the steaming vents of sulphur springs under the sea, shimmering shoals, kaleidoscopic coral constellations, all of it alive and swaying and surging around him, and he perceives himself, recognises himself in no uncertain terms: a tiny scrap of life, but utterly content.”

This paragraph, the closing lines of the book, epitomises the wistful feel of the novel, its pathos, and the author’s elegant mastery and exquisite manipulation of language.

In tone and somewhat in substance, this book reminded me of Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, which also plays with the same sense of nostalgia for a lost world, a dystopia with is roots firmly grounded in literary fiction. This novel would suit an English-language publisher interested in beautiful (and I mean beautiful) writing, complexity of structure without the need for a strong plot, and plumbing the uncomfortable depths of such universal themes as climate change, grief and longing.

Published by: S. Fischer Verlag

Pages: 286