High as the Waters Rise

In High As The Waters Rise, our protagonist, Waclaw, works on an oil drilling platform in the middle of the Atlantic sea. One night, he returns to his bunk to find his best friend and fellow rig oil worker, Mátyás, missing. Soon, Mátyás is declared dead, Waclaw is given time off and flown back to land, and thus begins his search for meaning. Beginning in their apartment in Tangier, Morocco, he ends up in Mátyás’s hometown in Hungary, Malta, rural Italy, and his mining hometown in Germany, where his devoutly Catholic father worked and died. Anja Kampmann’s novel, translated from the German by Anne Posten, is meandering — in a good way. You feel Waclaw’s pain and sorrow for his lost friend. You feel how terrible the oil drilling business is, and how it crushes the men who work on the rigs. I admit that I did struggle to the end — I just wanted his journey to end. I wanted him to find peace. But, upon reflection, I think that is the point of the novel: you feel Waclaw’s agony.

High as the Waters Rise is a portrait of this very sad and lost man, but also a story of climate change and the global economy. On why she decided to write about oil workers, Kampmann explained, “ I was fascinated by this world on which we all depend, and yet is almost invisible to us. People hardly ever think about the origin of the petrol they put into their cars, or the oil in every plastic bag and in the asphalt which covers our streets… We drill two thousand meters underneath the sea floor; we seem to be in control, but we lose ourselves along the way, we’re human.”

Rating: ★★★★