Quicksands

Two men, both determined to die on the same autumn morning in the German forest. Egon von Ernau has brought a revolver to the trees, unable to bear another moment of a life that feels like a cruel joke. Instead, he hears singing, then splashing, and finds Gottlieb Pigglewitch pulling himself from a lake after a failed attempt to drown himself. Egon saves him. In the strange hours that follow, these two strangers sit in the mud and trade their miseries: gambling debts, failed loves, the grinding boredom of existence, the way the world's cheerfulness feels like an insult to their particular anguish. What begins as accidental interruption becomes something like communion. Streckfuss, writing decades before Freud or Camus, understood something essential about despair: that it can be contagious, but so can its relief. The title is darkly funny, a metaphor that holds: we sink into our sadness, and the more we struggle, the deeper we go. Yet sometimes a hand reaches down. Sometimes another drowning person saves you. This is a slim, strange, quietly devastating novel about the thin membrane between wanting to live and wanting to die, and how easily it can tear.