Christopher Ecker’s novel “The Shining Fish Trap” | EUROtoday

“What we caught is gone, and what we didn’t catch was left to us”: This beautiful historic paradox from the mouths of fishermen is the motto of a e book that stands firstly of a little-noticed work. The motto would additionally match nicely with the whole work – as a result of Christopher Ecker, born in Saarbrücken in 1967, writes per se a mysterious literature by which supposed catches quickly slip out of your fingers, whereas the following fish is already leaping in your sight view. They are sometimes literary fish, academic fish, maybe a bit like Arno Schmidt’s, and the writer appears to have the anglers from the deciphering syndicate laughing in his thoughts when he lets the little animals flash after which disappear once more – typically in chapter titles equivalent to “The World of Tau”, “Red Alert” or “Fathers of Clothes”, which shimmer between excessive and popular culture.

Ecker’s literature borders on fantasy and science fiction – however his debut novel, which was revealed in 1997 and is now obtainable in a revised kind, initially reads like a good hard-boiled crime novel with typical parts of the style. The inspector seems earlier than our eyes vividly and unmistakably; the whole guard is aware of him as a “Michelin man” due to his extra weight, however that doesn’t hassle him as a result of: “After forty, it didn’t matter what a man looked like.” But for against the law thriller it quickly turns into very poetic: “Perhaps some people at home even looked up the difficult words in the lexicon in which the service group leader wrapped himself like a baroque monarch in his ermine cloak.”

But as quickly as you become involved on this degree of storytelling, Ecker enters a brand new one: as a result of now it turns into delusional and profound and goes into the guts of darkness. In transient: A affected person escaped from the clinic regardless that he was restrained there. The lacking Mr. Rescher, an “emaciated pensioner, alcoholic in rehab,” is quickly adopted by a “private snoop,” an early-retirement instructor named Gripke. He is smarter than the police enable and finds out that Rescher served in Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Apparently he was a part of a battalion that disappeared beneath mysterious circumstances in 1942. This requires analysis amongst historians, modern witnesses and descendants, a few of which have parodic traits. And it isn’t unusual for individuals to assume that the journey is only a delusion of Gripke and his pal Van Aaken, whose identify is harking back to Hieronymus Bosch’s start identify.

Interestingly, from at this time’s perspective, the puzzles on this novel usually call to mind the results of “hallucinating” AI, as a result of Ecker cheerfully mixes collectively names and titles for them, for instance from the works of the fantasists Arthur Machen and HP Lovecraft, the place he modifies particulars or explains fictional characters as actual ones. A bit of extra subtlety would typically have benefited him, as he usually hits the allusions, together with these based mostly on Edgar Allan Poe, with a picket mallet.

For the brand new version, Ecker left the plot untouched, however modified particulars and descriptions and researched them. The total impression of a aware hermeneutical overload stays within the textual content; as does its attraction of regularly oscillating between ironic on a regular basis observations of well-educated individuals and their tendency to paranoia.

He additionally inscribed this drive to search for that means in all places, even the place there’s none, in later characters, for instance in his mammoth work “Fahlmann” (2012) or within the campus novel “Herr Oluf in Hunsum” (2022). The literary scholar Kai U. Jürgens discovers additional references within the afterword. They reveal a community of motifs that now spans Ecker’s total work and extends even additional, specifically from “A Thousand and One Nights” to Philip Okay. Dick. An picture for deciphering the novel can be inscribed in a chapter heading: Correspondence Chess. “The Shining Trap” is correspondence chess with faux fish, however this unusual sport is enjoyable.

Christopher Ecker: “The shining fish trap”. Novel. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle 2025. With an afterword by Kai U. Jürgens. 312 pages, br., €24.