A mother-and-son road trip is propelled by guilt and unease in Christian Kracht’s hilariously unsettling novel

There were mixed reactions to the publication of Christian Kracht’s debut novel Faserland (1995), in which an unnamed twenty-something scion of a wealthy family travels through Germany while indulging in all manner of excess.

Some critics bemoaned the protagonist’s apathy and nihilism, and identified the worst excesses of postmodern fiction — an unreliable narrator, self-referential storytelling. Others lauded its skewering of consumer culture and held it up as a pioneer of German-language “pop” literature.

The books published since by the Swiss-born author have never failed to attract some sort of controversy, with Kracht seemingly determined to épater les bourgeois. In Eurotrash, his fifth novel, originally published in German in 2021, and a sequel of sorts to Faserland, Kracht tears into the hidden histories of collaboration and complacency that have weighed so heavily on Swiss families like his own.

“Anyway, so I had to go to Zurich again for a few days. My mother urgently wished to see me.” With these opening lines, the first-person narrator — a recognisable version of the author himself — sets out on a journey that will take him and his terminally ill, vodka-and-pills-addled mother from a psychiatric clinic in Zurich to a Nazi-inspired commune in the Bernese mountains, a glacier in the Alps and, finally, the grave of Jorge Luis Borges in a Geneva cemetery.

The mother-and-son road trip is propelled by guilt and unease. The narrator, who is seeking to fulfil his filial duties, is also waking up to the realisation that his privileged life was built on his forebears’ complicity with some of the 20th century’s worst atrocities. “It was as if for decades I’d been trailing along the verge of enormous malice and was simply unable to make it out.”

His mother’s own agenda, meanwhile, is to speedily unburden herself of her own wealth, “primarily invested in German weapons systems and Swiss dairy farms”. They agree that “the only way to deal with money sensibly was to give it away”. As they are driven around Switzerland, carrying bundles of banknotes in a bin-bag, Christian reflects on the fact “that there was indeed a correlation between money and garbage”.

To pass the time, and to soothe her anxieties, he tells his mother stories — including a dystopian yarn about Switzerland lurching to the extreme right, banning mosques, resettling immigrants, rounding up vegans, reintroducing public executions, annulling treaties with the European Union and strengthening ties with Great Britain. “That is a dreadful story, Christian,” she says, with undisguised delight.

Kracht is deliciously disrespectful of everyone, everywhere. Zurich is “a city of money-grubbing middle management and depressing hustlers and reserve lieutenants”. Geneva is “that dreadful, phony, ice-cold Protestant city, full of poseurs and braggarts and bean counters”. He is “astonished at the crassness in the faces of the Bernese, at their rustic deviousness and their wily Swiss instinct towards hostility . . . and their ossified insistence on their own provinciality”.

Switzerland, the semi-fictional Christian reflects, is a place with “no music and no films and no literature; there was nothing whatsoever in Switzerland except that Swiss longing for more banal luxury, the desire for sushi and colourful sneakers and Porsche Cayennes and the construction of further gigantic home improvement centres in the sprawling [agglomerations]”.

In more earnest hands, the subject matter might be unbearably grim, but Kracht treads lightly on the darkness. Here is the narrator explaining why his mother avoided swimming in Lake Zurich: “She’d always told me . . . that she could no longer swim [there] ever since . . . her best friend, had employed the Swiss company Exit for her assisted suicide and decreed that her ashes be strewn over the clear, pleasant waters of the lake. My mother had said she’d swallow a bit of lake water by accident while swimming, and then she’d be drinking Margie, and that was a ghastly notion to her.”

Beneath the acrid humour and the furious invective there develops a genuine tenderness in the relationship between Christian and his mother. Having long been alienated from one another, they find themselves forced into an unexpected form of intimacy as he learns to change her colostomy bags. For all its apparent cynicism, the book has a heart.

Such a fearless prose-stylist deserves an equally fearless translator, and in Daniel Bowles, Kracht has once again found a perfect partner. Depictions of the “calm, velveteen rattling of my mother”, or of politicians that “had been riven, had been rotten and ruined by their appalling power”, make Eurotrash not only a hilariously unsettling road-trip of a novel, but also an exhilarating read in its English-language rendition.

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles, Serpent’s Tail £12.99, 192 pages

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Eurotrash — unearthing a family’s collaboration and complacency