By Helen Elliott
FICTION
Eurotrash
Christian Kracht (Translated by Daniel Bowles)
Serpent’s Tail, $26.99
Do you love the term Eurotrash? I do. I love it because of the intricacy of the paradox encased in the two parts, Euro and trash. Two things never destined to be coupled? A reminder that satire and irony have no borders and wind with ease into and around each another. The adjective, Eurotrash, is outdated now, but Christian Kracht might polish it up again by calling his novel, Eurotrash. Although not all polished performances are for everyone. It’s useful to know who Guy Debord was. And Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I’d never heard of the latter.
Kracht is a Swiss novelist whose partner in life and sometimes in art is a filmmaker, and he says, usefully, that he is always “a writer performing as a writer”. Eurotrash is autofiction.
The novel is the narrative of a road trip taken by a mother and son through Switzerland, a picaresque novel of incidents, strung together along the road of the future and the past. The son is called Christian Kracht, although he is happy now and then to be known as an author called Daniel Kehlmann. Kehlmann is real, he has an approving blurb on the back cover and, obviously, Kracht is real. Well, discuss and dissect, or call in the philosophers - and maybe the doctors?
Kracht, whose books have been translated into 30 languages.Credit: Frauke Finsterwalder and Håkan Liljemärker
The mother, Frau Kracht, is over 80 and living in a luxurious Zurich apartmentwhere her housekeeper is stealing her money, and her Mercedes has been shipped to Macedonia under the eye of her housekeeper’s husband. Frau Kracht has three storage units filled with her unopened luxury items from Ferragamo, Hermes and various sable specialists. She had previously had been confined to a psychiatric hospital in Winterthur, but now she has urgently summoned her only child.
She is to get rid of all her money. So Christian, who both hates and loves his mother, designs the road trip, performing the picaresque in a way to send the money out into the world in a basic manner: Swiss francs in plastic bags and handbags. It turns out, it is amusingly difficult to dispose of money like this.
In an interview for the International Booker Prize – Eurotrash is one of this year’s longlisted novels – Kracht says: “This book is about my mother, who loved vodka and Phenobarbital very much. She was a horrible person but also a wonderful person.”
Kracht’s tenderness for his mother, a woman whom he remembers wearing a Pucci bikini in their house at St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, filters through on every page, and it is the tenderness which must come from acknowledging her own awful past (Nazi family, vile husband and father of her son, child abuse) and, despite all this, her persistent attempts to maintain decency of sorts.
Her son catalogues all her faults and her slide into paranoia and dementia, but he also suggests she might have been able to “maintain decency in her delirium”. That she has not killed herself is a marvel in itself, living as she does in the country renowned for assisting death.
Switzerland itself is presented as grand, eternal, impenetrable. The Swiss people, in contrast, as small-minded and mean-spirited; people who have replaced the concept of soul with empiricism of money. Kracht – the novelist, not the protagonist – suggests that Switzerland is simply the small country that reflects the European mass. Who wouldn’t live on a Swiss lake if they had the dosh? The mother and son travel the country, starting in Zurich, where the language is German, going all the way across to Geneva where the language is French. Christian, intimate with both, hates them furiously and democratically.
I loved this book, although it took me a decade to read because I stopped every page to look up all the references. There are 190 pages, all layered, most arcane, some witty, some annoying, or boring but I am not the same reader who picked it up frowning over that first line: Anyway, so I had to go to Zurich again for a few days. What? Are we in a telephone conversation?
Buckle up, you’re in for a wild ride wasn’t mentioned either. It should have been. There’s increasing space for a cheap cliché these days.
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