Eurotrash

Starred review from August 5, 2024
It’s autofiction on the autobahn in this incendiary outing from Kracht (Imperium). A middle-aged writer named Christian Kracht visits his mother in Zurich, where she’s been living alone and subsisting on vodka, phenobarbital, and cheese slices since divorcing her rich husband. Disgusted by the “city of poseurs and braggarts and debasements,” by his estimation, he proposes a road trip, determined to coax her out of her claustrophobic apartment and her “spider web of resentment, fury, and loneliness.” She accepts, on the condition that he help her “squander” a substantial amount of cash from her bank account, and he agrees (“the only way to deal with money sensibly was to give it away,” Christian reflects). Thanks to their liberally paid taxi driver, they visit an eerie commune, head to the mountains in search of wild edelweiss, and visit Borges’s grave in Geneva, the only city Christian detests more than Zurich. All the while, the two warily circle around their simmering resentments and Christian’s disgust with his “dead and soulless” family’s Nazi connections. A playful tale of reconciliation that never becomes saccharine, this is one readers won’t want to miss. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

August 15, 2024
The belated second installment of the Swiss novelist's semiautobiographical remembrance of his wealthy family's Nazi-stained past. In Kracht'sFaserland (1995), the young author of a novel with that title wandered across Europe, kissing off the 1980s with his aimlessness and addictions. Picking up where that book left off, Kracht's sequel begins in Zurich, where the fictional novelist, Christian, goes to care for his 80-year-old mother, newly released from a mental institution. Subsisting on vodka and barbiturates, she is, "like Miss Havisham, caught in a spider web of resentment, fury, and loneliness." So, in his cynical fashion, is Christian, still grappling with childhood abuses. His mother's malicious bag of tricks included feigning death on the laundry room floor. When not dancing to Dietrich in women's clothing, his father lived to torment and debase others. And Christian's maternal grandfather was an active Nazi sympathizer. Christian, who loves his mother despite everything, decides to take her on a long road trip in a hired car before putting her back in the mental hospital. During the journey, we learn that he wore makeup from the age of 13 to 27, wishes he had David Bowie's crooked teeth, and prefers spy thrillers to the intellectual classics his mother tries to force on him. He uses the trip to give away her vast savings, "money we had swindled from arms factories," and she hopes to see an edelweiss flower for the first time. A leading figure in European postmodernism, the 57-year-old Kracht offsets Christian's rock-generation disillusionment with charged language. As entertaining as that is, this novel feels incomplete. It needs to be read with its short predecessor--and its possible successor(s)--to achieve lasting power. Set largely during a long car trip, a mother-and-son novel with compelling psychological gear shifts but not enough traction.

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September 1, 2024

The winner of the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize returns to his autofictional narrator "Christian," from his bestselling 1995 debut, Faserland. Christian is in Zurich to care for his mother and is thinking of his family's history. He and his mother decide to go on a road trip to Switzerland to give away the family fortune. Prepub Alert.

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