What cannot be said

Centuries pass, the ways of telling the story change, but the horror remains the same. At its core lies the fear of death, of the unknown, of that which we cannot comprehend or control. A horror that both attracts and repels. Something that defies naming, in the face of which words tremble and shatter.

It is in this ‘unfinished land, abandoned by God in His wrath’ that language, though destined to fail, attempts to venture forth, orbiting a black hole without ever reaching its centre. And if silence seals the horror, the word attempts to pierce it, like a flash of lightning in the dark. Writing thus becomes a form of resistance to death, one of Nicolas Born’s ‘spells’, with which to keep ‘the erratic and groundless essence of the world’ under a spell, conjuring up ghosts from the inscrutable depths of the void.

Reading "Quello che non si può dire" by Dorothee Elmiger, winner of the 2025 Deutscher Buchpreis, means experiencing that magic: storytelling as a means of stemming the anguish generated by what remains unknown. Just like the mysterious news story that sets the novel in motion. In 2014, two young Dutch women disappeared in the Panamanian jungle, leaving behind insufficient clues to piece together what had happened. Among these were ninety-one indecipherable photographs, taken in rapid succession before dawn. Ten years later, a well-known theatre director, fascinated by the mystery, decides to set a play at the site of the disappearance, together with artists, technicians and a writer tasked with recording the details of the undertaking. The disappearance of the Dutch women becomes the void around which the stories the characters tell one another revolve as they venture into the heart of the forest: a ‘panting, steaming organism’, tainted by a past of conquest, an emanation of a ‘great empty god’.

Amidst echoes of Melville and Conrad, references to the cinema of Herzog and Coppola, and reflections by Adorno and Horkheimer, Elmiger also reveals the arrogance of the contemporary world: the presumption that everything can be understood, replicated and made functional. Subtle connections emerge between different forms of violence: in relationships between men and women, in the subjugation of nature, in colonial history, and within the family. This extends even to artistic representation and writing, which are exposed to the risk of reproducing these very logics. The narrative unfolds frame by frame. Between one image and the next, a shadowed space creeps in. That which cannot be said. The dark reverse of the visible.

    

Dorothee Elmiger
, "What Cannot Be Said
", Gramma Feltrinelli, 176 pp., 18 euros