Verwandte Artikel zu Submersed: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World...

Submersed: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines - Softcover

Frank, Matthew Gavin

 
9780593686034: Submersed: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593686039 ISBN 13: 9780593686034
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A fascinating foray into the world of deep-sea divers, the obsession and madness that oceans inspire in us, and the story of submarine inventor Peter Madsen's murder of journalist Kim Wall

Submersed begins with an investigation into the beguiling subculture of DIY submersible obsessives: men and women—but mostly men—who are so compelled to sink into the deep sea that they become amateur backyard submarine-builders. Should they succeed in fashioning a craft in their garage or driveway and set sail, they do so at great personal risk—as the 2023 fatal implosion of OceanGate’s much more highly funded sub, Titan, proved to the world.

Matthew Gavin Frank explores the origins of the human compulsion to sink to depth, from the diving bells of Aristotle and Alexander the Great to the Confederate H. L. Hunley, which became the first submersible to sink an enemy warship before itself being sunk during the Civil War. The deeper he plunges, however, the more the obsession seems to dovetail with more threatening traits. Following the grisly murder of journalist Kim Wall at the hands of eccentric entrepreneur Peter Madsen aboard his DIY midget submarine, Frank finds himself reckoning with obsession's darkest extremes.

Weaving together elements of true crime, the strange history of the submarine, the mythology of the deep sea, and the physical and mental side effects of sinking to great depth, Frank attempts to get to the bottom of this niche compulsion to chase the extreme in our planet’s bodies of water and in our own bodies. What he comes to discover, and interrogate, are the odd and unexpected overlaps between the unquenchable human desire to descend into deep water, and a penchant for unspeakable violence.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK is the author of the nonfiction books Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, The Mad Feast, Preparing the Ghost, Pot Farm, and Barolo, as well as the poetry books The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Guernica, The New Republic, Iowa Review, Salon, Conjunctions, The Believer, and the Best Travel Writing and Best Food Writing anthologies. He’s a professor of creative writing in the Masters of Fine Arts Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is also the Nonfiction/Hybrids Editor of the literary magazine, Passages North.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

If Denmark were a human body, the island of Refshaleøen would be the appendix. It dangles into the Øresund Strait as if some vestigial appendage, subordinate to the larger island of Amager—­to which it is presently annexed. On maps, the island appears a little obscene and expendable. Its streets front vast and empty warehouses, factories. The cold sea air has crept into these buildings’ bricks and blocks and beams, compelled them to buckle and bloat. They resemble the petrified remains of giant sea creatures—­their beached mythological rib cages frozen in mid-­heave.

Many in Copenhagen still refer to the island as “a place to be transformed” from its long-­ingrained status as crumbling defunct shipyard to (according to the island’s town council) “a vibrant new destination.” To that end, on the cold grounds of windowless slate-­gray buildings that once held ship guts, fetid ropes, and rusting propellers, artists now paint and sculpt. Inspired perhaps by the warehouses’ gaping spaces, their work is oftentimes larger than life and can’t fit through the doors. This work is either imprisoned in the space in which it was created or must be dismantled into its parts. Eccentric engineers joint disparate found components—­outriggers, hulls, shards of glass, conveyor belt ramps, oil cans, toilet seats, accordion bellows, and mannequin heads—­into unholy machines that clank and whir, beautifully without purpose. Here, amid the decaying factories, there are now festivals—­the Copenhell heavy metal extravaganza with its Hades stage; the Copenhagen Distortion Celebration of Nightlife with its “Anything Goes” credo sponsored by Adidas and Red Bull; and the Scandinavia Reggae Festival, “presenting artists from the Scandinavian reggae scene” such as Svenska Akademien, Fastpoholmen, and Spöket.

Many locals who lived through the oil crisis of 1973, which resulted in a global shipbuilding catastrophe, struggle to absorb this new narrative, this quick and drastic recasting of Refshaleøen’s identity. They remember too well the oil embargo that spawned a price increase of nearly 400 percent in Europe. They remember how the shipyards in China, Japan, and South Korea capitalized on the severity with which the crisis hit Europe via a multifaceted plan involving wage cuts, state subsidies, streamlined production plants, and a keen price dumping agenda. Almost overnight, the European shipbuilding market share dropped from 41 percent to 18 percent, as the Asian market share jumped from 46 percent to 70 percent. They remember how, when Refshaleøen’s Burmeister & Wain shipyard went bankrupt and closed its doors, that meant over eight thousand layoffs.

Those who once worked in the shipyard’s many divisions—­pipe production, design, engineering, carpentry, scaffolding, electronics, sandblasting, iron, and steel—­were, according to studies, simply “absorbed,” or “dissolved,” meaning they were never traced, which is not the same thing as disappearing. All those spaces, which once held the chorus and noise of eight thousand people and their tools, their banging, their schematics, their hulls, and their sparks, every conversation shared, every confession of joy and tragedy, plans made and failed plans, suddenly were silent, abandoned, a few broken beams left behind, a few handfuls of rusty nails. The warehouses became lost colonies, and the wind whistled through them.

•

A tree falls in the woods. A lightbulb inexplicably bursts in an empty warehouse. Ants the size of pinkies rove among the glass. Five kilometers away, at the central station, freight and passenger trains whine and rumble, cars couple and detach; wooden sleepers rattle, concrete sleepers vibrate, loads of coal topple and loads of sugar beets roll. The shells of the cars are uniformly damp and gleaming, and will dry and dull only after leaving Copenhagen, chugging along the rails on their way to some other sector.

The winds off the North and Baltic Seas meet in the middle of the Øresund Strait, and, even in the summertime, crust Refshaleøen with sea spray and chill. In the winter, the place is ice-­hardened and dark, squeaky with cold. The sun sets before 3:00 p.m., and the eastern currents, carried to the island’s shores by the Siberian High, can cause one to gasp. The ants go deep underground. It’s too cold for the local teenagers to spray-­paint their names and the names of Norse gods on the sides of the warehouses with ungloved hands. In their mittens, they fumble with the cans. Their faces are masked in the fog of their own exhalations. Half of their paint streams freeze in the air before reaching the warehouse flanks. Some of the frozen red mist spatters their boot-­tops. Still, shivering, they manage to write their names amid the other graffiti—­the lightning bolts and boobs, the hearts and the swastikas.

During these winter months, many locals swear by phototherapy devices—­artificial light visors, or golden-­lensed sunglasses to lend their world the illusion of brightness—­to combat seasonal affective disorder. All this cold goes golden. All this ice, richly piss-­colored. Refshaleøen and its shipyards and shop fronts and residents and sea become uniformly jaundiced. Such measures, though, often fail, and insufficiently mitigate the symptoms associated with living here during the winter—­feelings of despair, hopelessness, dread, and anxiety, low energy, insomnia, apathy, and an almost unbearable obsession with death. The city council urges the inhabitants to lock up their firearms and put the keys in difficult-­to-­reach places, so they may have to think twice and exert sufficient effort before turning said firearms on their loved ones, or on themselves.

•

The Øresund Strait, with its maximum depth of 131 feet, conceals the invasive and omnivorous pacu fish that proliferate in its waters, and that are “fully capable”—­according to the University of Copenhagen’s cautionary article “Danish Swimmers Escape Waters Fearing Killer Fish”—­“of severing fishing lines and even fingers.” On their bellies are serrated keels. The pacu’s teeth, disarmingly, look exactly like those of a human. They often have a slight overbite. With these teeth, they have chewed off the faces of other fish, have eviscerated juvenile crocodiles, have left scars on human shoulders, necks, and rib cages, scars that are often mistaken for human bite marks; scars that some joke are the result of overzealous former lovers. Scars that, especially in the winter months, still redden and itch. Pacu corpses sometimes wash up onto the shores of Refshaleøen, and children dare each other to open the fishes’ mouths and not scream when they behold those humanoid teeth.

The pacu is endemic to the waters of South America and shouldn’t be here in Denmark. How it got here remains a mystery, or a miracle (though few here would call the pacu’s presence miraculous). Was it deliberately loosed into these waters by some traveling prankster? Was it a hardy escapee from a local’s exotic aquarium? Did it slip through some rip in the space-­time continuum, a phantasmal hopper amid biomes? Is its presence an anomaly or abomination, or both? Either way, the local wildlife authorities advise those who unexpectedly catch a pacu to immediately “cut the head off the fish and dispose of [it] as garbage.” An abomination is a miracle that bites.

These waters have seen their fair share of so-­called abominations. In 1550, the fabled...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593686039
ISBN 13 
9780593686034
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
321
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar