inesfrieda's review
adventurous
funny
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
4.5
picavaria's review
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
This was a syrupily effective representation of a narrator with depression. As someone who shares that mental illness, I wanted to signpost it as the book was a valuable but challenging journey.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Mental illness
spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
3.0
I read this review and now I desperately want to read this book in German. I don't think my German is good enough to read the original, sadly, but I might pester one of my friends into helping... idk!
scribepub's review
An unfathomable and imaginative parable about Austria and how it dealt with its National Socialist past … [P]hilosophical and fantastic.
Florian Baranyi, ORF
Edelbauer crosses borders and advances into unexplored areas of literature.
2017 Rauriser Literature Prize Jury Citation
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
Edelbauer’s essays are huge and impossible, utopian and full of fantastical realisms, brilliant and unwieldy. Vulcanoid salvos, cold and hard, which hit the reader with brute force.
Marietta Böning, Magazine of the Literaturhaus Wien
For a novel meticulously built on a series of familiar, strange, and compelling conceptual metaphors, The Liquid Land isn't a dense or overly taxing read—just the opposite, in fact. Ruth's brief meditations on the nature of time and space at the beginning of the novel become our entry-point into the first of many motifs Edelbauer spends the rest of the book unpicking: the fluidity of time and space in our social lives, the implications of ecological collapse, the permeability of natural and built worlds, and our attempt to make sense of the past, and more importantly, come to terms with it. With The Liquid Land, Raphaela Edelbauer has written a book that is oblique, familiar, and completely new. It's a fascinating, heady combination.
Khalid Warsame, ABC Arts
Edelbauer conjures a gut-level queasiness around questions of participation in and propagation of historical lies in a country with a silenced history of violence. This novel becomes a study of the deformations that such silences work upon citizens and indeed on physical landscapes. It’s a visceral wrestle with the presence of the past.
Bernard Caleo, Readings
A Freudian exploration of complicated grief.
The Times
The Liquid Land is a tale that nods to the traditions of magical realism while also exploring the threat of a very real past. On one level, it deals with a practical problem that falls to the protagonist, Ruth. But in searching for the solution — a town that has written itself off the map — she uncovers a looming danger that threatens to engulf the place. An intoxicating adventure unfolds from this unique premise.
Happy Mag
Ably translated from the German by Jen Calleja, Raphaela Edelbauer’s impressive debut novel is a subtle allegory of historical memory and collective guilt, combining a dreamy, gothic strangeness with whimsical humour and an element of farce … The novel’s deft blend of registers – at once uncannily foreboding and drily comic – makes for an absorbing and memorable tale.>
Houman Barekat, The Guardian
Florian Baranyi, ORF
Edelbauer crosses borders and advances into unexplored areas of literature.
2017 Rauriser Literature Prize Jury Citation
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
Edelbauer’s essays are huge and impossible, utopian and full of fantastical realisms, brilliant and unwieldy. Vulcanoid salvos, cold and hard, which hit the reader with brute force.
Marietta Böning, Magazine of the Literaturhaus Wien
For a novel meticulously built on a series of familiar, strange, and compelling conceptual metaphors, The Liquid Land isn't a dense or overly taxing read—just the opposite, in fact. Ruth's brief meditations on the nature of time and space at the beginning of the novel become our entry-point into the first of many motifs Edelbauer spends the rest of the book unpicking: the fluidity of time and space in our social lives, the implications of ecological collapse, the permeability of natural and built worlds, and our attempt to make sense of the past, and more importantly, come to terms with it. With The Liquid Land, Raphaela Edelbauer has written a book that is oblique, familiar, and completely new. It's a fascinating, heady combination.
Khalid Warsame, ABC Arts
Edelbauer conjures a gut-level queasiness around questions of participation in and propagation of historical lies in a country with a silenced history of violence. This novel becomes a study of the deformations that such silences work upon citizens and indeed on physical landscapes. It’s a visceral wrestle with the presence of the past.
Bernard Caleo, Readings
A Freudian exploration of complicated grief.
The Times
The Liquid Land is a tale that nods to the traditions of magical realism while also exploring the threat of a very real past. On one level, it deals with a practical problem that falls to the protagonist, Ruth. But in searching for the solution — a town that has written itself off the map — she uncovers a looming danger that threatens to engulf the place. An intoxicating adventure unfolds from this unique premise.
Happy Mag
Ably translated from the German by Jen Calleja, Raphaela Edelbauer’s impressive debut novel is a subtle allegory of historical memory and collective guilt, combining a dreamy, gothic strangeness with whimsical humour and an element of farce … The novel’s deft blend of registers – at once uncannily foreboding and drily comic – makes for an absorbing and memorable tale.>
Houman Barekat, The Guardian
scribepub's review against another edition
An unfathomable and imaginative parable about Austria and how it dealt with its National Socialist past … [P]hilosophical and fantastic.
Florian Baranyi, ORF
Edelbauer crosses borders and advances into unexplored areas of literature.
2017 Rauriser Literature Prize Jury Citation
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
Edelbauer’s essays are huge and impossible, utopian and full of fantastical realisms, brilliant and unwieldy. Vulcanoid salvos, cold and hard, which hit the reader with brute force.
Marietta Böning, Magazine of the Literaturhaus Wien
Florian Baranyi, ORF
Edelbauer crosses borders and advances into unexplored areas of literature.
2017 Rauriser Literature Prize Jury Citation
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
Edelbauer’s essays are huge and impossible, utopian and full of fantastical realisms, brilliant and unwieldy. Vulcanoid salvos, cold and hard, which hit the reader with brute force.
Marietta Böning, Magazine of the Literaturhaus Wien
loreabad6's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
eleonorehilbig's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
what a weird and incredible book.
how do the children/grandchildren deal with the crimes of their ancestors? how bad a person do we allow grandpa to be essentially.
truly incredible.
how do the children/grandchildren deal with the crimes of their ancestors? how bad a person do we allow grandpa to be essentially.
truly incredible.