Edward Marchesi In the heart of the Panamanian rainforest, where the lush vegetation hides unexplored secrets, a story unfolds that defies our comprehension. Dorothee Elmiger's novel, What Cannot Be Said , winner of the 2025 German Book Prize, draws on a true event to explore the limits of language and reason.
In 2014, two young Dutch women, Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon, disappeared while hiking. The search led to the discovery of some seemingly indecipherable nighttime photographs, which fueled speculation and theories. Elmiger doesn't simply recount the story, but uses this mystery to question our need for explanations.
A journey into the jungle and the human mind
The story begins with a theater director who decides to take a company to the site of the disappearance to create a play. A writer is assigned to document the experience, initially describing the environment and the group's dynamics. However, as the expedition progresses, disorientation takes over.
The jungle becomes a symbol of chaos and the unknowable.
The mental categories used to understand the experience begin to crumble, and what should have been an artistic project about mystery turns into a direct confrontation with it. The expedition, conceived to represent an inexplicable event, ends up being absorbed by the very impossibility of attributing a certain meaning to what happens.
Photographs that reveal nothing
One of the most disturbing elements of the real case are the photographs taken during the night of April 8th. These images, taken mostly in the darkness of the vegetation, seem to produce the opposite effect to that expected: the more they are observed, the less capable they seem of explaining.
Elmiger uses these photographs as a metaphor for the void that remains when a document fails to fulfill the function we assign to it. The novel explores what happens when the desire to know becomes even stronger in the face of an indecipherable image, creating a tension between the visible and the unknowable.
The need to explain the unsolvable
An unsolved case is difficult to accept because it disrupts one of the fundamental structures through which we interpret experience: causality. We want to know what happened, why it happened, and the order in which events unfolded. When certain steps are missing, we are almost spontaneously drawn to fill them in, transforming possibilities into hypotheses, and sometimes hypotheses into convictions.
Elmiger brings this mechanism into literature and makes it part of the novel itself. The director wants to get closer to the site of the disappearance, reconstruct it through theater, and perhaps achieve something that documents have failed to convey, while the writer must use words to recount an experience that increasingly seems to elude the possibility of being named.
The novel thus also becomes a reflection on the boundary between knowledge and narration. Recounting an event inevitably means selecting elements, establishing connections, and creating a form; precisely for this reason, a story can convey the impression of order even when the reality from which it arises remains chaotic.
Elmiger's literature, on the other hand, seems to want to preserve that chaos and force the reader to experience uncertainty and the unknowable, offering a profound reflection on our need to find explanations in a world that often lacks them.