Literature: About squids and people: “Because there was something in the water”

It is usually forbidden to reveal the ending of a book. In this case, however, it is probably legitimate, as this novel cannot be read from the first to the last page anyway. Footnotes repeatedly advise you to continue elsewhere. In addition, the plot defies dramaturgical standards. So let’s come straight to the non-conclusion and the scene described there, in which a character who is called “our young author” and who has certain similarities with Luca Kieser, the actual author of the book “Because there was something in the water” , hanging his penis in a glass of cold chamomile tea.

The penis had previously been circumcised in an operation to relieve long-standing pain during sex; a so-called “Spanish collar” was present. You can google it for more details. In any case, while caring for the wound, the young author’s vision suddenly becomes black, he falls out of the window and suddenly lands in the sea, more precisely in the strait where Odysseus once encountered the monster Scylla. Here the young man meets a giant squid who has retreated to heal his own wound, which he sustained while attacking a ship. Now the squid’s arms swarm around the young author, who seems to transform himself into a squid. In any case, he sprays his ink and the squid eagerly paints characters in the water.

There is some evidence that he is formulating the stories that were told in the previous pages. Namely, the squid’s arms, which have different names – they are called “The Poor Arm”, “The Conceited Arm” or “The Bit-Shy Arm” – and are also very individual in their views. They keep interrupting each other and taking over the floor.

What’s going on here? In the debut of the author, who was born in Tübingen in 1992, a lot of things make little sense in a frivolous way, but other things are, if not logical, at least poetologically justifiable. The arms of the squid can become the narrator of this story because in the first pages they came across a deep-sea cable, whose information stream they enthusiastically short-circuited. From then on they chatter away wildly, talking about Jules Verne and Captain Nemo, about the genesis of the blockbuster “Jaws” and about the invention of the concept of sustainability in the German forest of the 18th century. Above all, they unfold a family history spanning over 200 years that connects the majority of the human protagonists.

A young woman completes an internship on a trawler, comes into contact with a captured squid and releases it again. She receives help from an agent from the German intelligence service who has dark memories of her childhood. The two are distantly related, just like the trawler’s owner. Their common ancestor once fought a squid as a sailor on a ship. Since then, the family has had a special relationship with the sea. Some are afraid of the sea, others feel inexplicably drawn to it.

Something seems to be unfinished; the ancestor’s encounter with the squid has left a biographical, perhaps even anthropological gap that this novel attempts to close. “Because there was something in the water,” that much is certain, is a daring piece of literature. The book stands out in a pleasing way from the flood of all the stylistically flawless, semi-biographical and quarter-exciting debuts that come onto the market every six months. Someone here has actually set himself an ambitious goal. Just which one? Only on page 96 do you get an idea. A biologist explains that squid and humans have a common ancestor, but at some point in evolution they took a different turn. The vertebrates, and thus later also humans, would have done everything they could to incorporate the world into themselves, while the invertebrates, and thus also the squids, would have turned themselves inside out towards the world.

The characters’ familial complications are a reflection of their evolutionary ones. And when the now foreskinless young author unites with the squid, he reveals his innermost being on behalf of an entire species and is rewarded with a transformation. Human hubris is rarely found so happily turned into its opposite as it is here. This young author there on the bottom of the sea doesn’t care that reality doesn’t allow people to undergo metamorphosis, he just goes through with it anyway. So someone is happily outwitting biology using the means of literature. If not an ending, then this is certainly one of the most original happy endings this season.

Luca Kieser: Because there was something in the water. Picus-Verlag, 320 pages, hardcover, €26.