Eurotrash comes with an unmistakeable Dantean warning in the form of an epigraph by Borges: ‘if you love Germany, you shouldn’t visit it’. As a term, the title itself functions as both misnomer and pitiable inheritance in Swiss author Christian Kracht’s latest novel, recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize. One could question whether this was a deliberate decision to bias readers before the turning of a single page, then forcing them to re-evaluate it in the way the protagonist and his mother must with their own lives.
A writer of little reknown by the name of Christian Kracht travels to Zurich, one of his regular visits to his ill mother. Recently discharged from a psychiatric ward and frail from surgery, she lives in the peculiar contradictory squalor of the rich. Living off cheap wine and processed cheese but surrounded by luxury items, materialism here evokes other fictional protagonists. A cabinet of cashmere Ferragamo sweaters parallels the stacks of English silk shirts of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby; grandeur amidst loneliness. When his mother says ‘even in the greatest decrepitude we maintain our poise’, we understand this to mean not simply physical and mental degeneration but emotional as well.
We learn about their prominent Nazi family and friends: a closed circle of secrets which have ruinously impacted his mother’s life and his own. Given glimpses of the Kracht skeletons from sexual depravity and cronyism to the rape of his mother as a child, it is unsurprising the mother and son’s discordant relationship reflects this, with revelations disclosed like water dripping from a faulty tap. Christian, contemplating these familial horrors, wonders, ‘should one ever succeed in interrupting the cycle of history, one could influence not only the future but the past as well.’.
On a whim, Christian tells his mother—referred to with both formal and personal anonymity as Mama, Madame, or Mrs. Kracht—they are to go on a trip, which she assumes is Africa, a naïve and illogical desire to make right the horrors of the past. What follows, after withdrawing hundreds of thousands of armaments-accrued Swiss francs carried with little regard in a plastic bag (‘I thought about the fact that there was indeed a correlation between money and garbage’), is a quixotic adventure in a taxi through Switzerland: here to eat trout in a particular restaurant, there to see edelweiss fields. The fantasy of going to Africa and ridding themselves of her poison wealth along the way is held up as a happy—and only impossible in the eyes of the reader—grail.
Eurotrash is less a story about the curse of money and perceived position as it is a story about stories. Joan Didion’s famous line ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’, is a matter of survival. When one is faced with a family line whose rot extends to any fruit it bears, the bipolar states of its denial and realisation offer no escape, everything functioning as a pervasive Proustian curse. Even his mother’s perfume, the long-discontinued Ashes of Roses by Bourjois, nods to both the young Christian’s burning down of his school and the horrors of Nazi atrocity. The stories he makes up for his mother are the only respite from the familial and historical weight both bear; as they go further, unable to rid themselves of money and the past, the deeper they ensconce themselves.
The narrative is an intentional literary and pop-cultural labyrinth. Christian and his mother speak in cryptic quotes and anecdotes from Georges Bataille and Cervantes, Graham Greene and Sebald, referencing everything and everyone to The Shining, John le Carré, and David Bowie. What can feel pretentious at times alongside half-remembered memories in fact reveal the ease in which we can slip into a line, scene, or a character as a form of escape. Didion’s line is a truism in that we are both real and created. This is not a contradiction but necessity. With the traumatic especially, everything speaks to memory, fantasy, mythology; the possibilities we accept or reject in coming to terms (or not) with who we are, and so each mention is a kind of clue towards understanding the pair. The translation by Daniel Bowles captures a constant agitation in both external and internal dialogues, veering from Christian’s Bernhardeque contemplation of Zurich to their tense, at times almost claustrophobic banter.
Kracht the author plays with this further: not just by the use of his own name within the book, but with an ongoing joke which sees Kracht the character pretending to be, or berated for not writing more like Daniel Kehlmann, the real-life German writer (who also provided a blurb for Eurotrash). These deliberate blurrings of reality and fiction throughout ask the questions, who are you when you are made up of others, and how far are you willing to go to create a life of your own? The answer, just as cryptically, lies close to the end of the story, when they stop in Geneva and visit Borges’ grave. Christian asks what its inscription (‘And ne forhtedon na’) reads: she replies that in Old English, it is ‘don't be afraid’.
Don Quixote and Borges are ultimately at the heart of Eurotrash, representing Christian’s wish to break the cyclic ‘eternal return’ of their cursed lives. The weaving of past and present with fiction and fantasy allow mother and son to create a new world—a new mythology—for themselves containing a peace and freedom previously impossible.
‘Go on with the story.’
‘You don’t know the end?’
‘Yes, of course, but I would rather hear you tell it.’
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Eurotrash is published by Serpent's Tail