Eurotrash by Christain Kracht
Swiss fiction
The original title is Eurotrash
Translator – Daniel Bowles
Source – personal copy
I’m a bit slow off the block with my Booker international reviews. But life sometimes just catches up with me. I have read a number of the books in fact tonight I hope finish the fourst of the list anyway this was the first I read, I had seen this pop up a couple of times before the longlist and I had vaguely heard the writers name, maybe because it was shortlisted when it came out for both the German and Swiss book prize both of which I look at most years, hoping at some point to maybe read one fo those shortlists in there original language. Christian Kracht is both a novelist and journalist; he is known to consistently perform as a writer. He has said some things to maybe provoke a reaction. This book is a follow-up to his debut novel, but 35 years later, as a writer, he takes his elderly mother on a road trip.
I had once inquired: the University of Montana held no records of his ever having studied there, let alone grad-uated. Neither the alumni association nor the university archives found a Christian Kracht. There were also photos that showed him at his fake job at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Then he’d returned to Germany, into the benevolent clutches of Eduard Rhein and British Major George Clare, whose parents had been murdered in Auschwitz and who worked in the denazification bureau in Hamburg as liaison officer to the newly emergent, democratic German press and who committed Axel Springer to eternal friendship with Israel, an effort that so repulsed many SS alumni that they went off to Rudolf Augstein’s Der Spiegel magazine instead.
My father and Augstein often sat together in their favorite restaurant, Mühlenkamper Fährhaus. Each only ever ordered the Schlemmerschnitte-caviar and steak tartare on thickly buttered black bread-which, Augstein claimed, Hans Albers had always eaten there before the war. To accompany it Augstein drank ice-cold glasses of Linie aquavit, my father mineral water.
The past and of course the wealth does show through at times
SO what wee have Kracht discusses his family history and how his family made a lot of money of the Nazis and this book is how him and his mother in her 80s deal with that she has just be released from a mental institution. As the two follow a road south through Switzerland through the places he grew up, his mother also knows they had planned to give away some of the fortune made from the family to clear their shoulds. The book isn’t overly plot heavy and more a group of meeting along the way that see them trying to get rid of the money and condf=fronting other horrors from there past now the mother running of prescription drugs and Booze. Her son is full of the ghosts of his own past, overbearing family members, sexual abuse and the dark history of the making of the family fortune. This makes for a black comedy of a book about two people trying to reconnect and put things right, but along the way making some falls.
Often, when old people who have lost touch would like to suggest elegance, they resort to Bulgari. In my youth, there had been a Bulgari glass case with Bulgari jewelry in the dreadful discotheque Club Rotes Kliff on Sylt, in Kampen.
And in the dreadful luxury hotels in Marbella and Venice and Positano there were always Bulgari grooming products lying around in the bathrooms. Dreadful places like Qatar and Dubai were serviced by dreadful luxury airlines who likewise offered Bulgari products in their in-flight shower stalls.
Over the years my mother had internalized the idea that Bul-gari must embody something elegant, something desirable, while in reality these products and this name only triggered depression and thoughts of suicide. In which wardrobe were her cashmere sweaters, please, I called down the stairs.
His mother is a unique character in this book
I am aware this writer has been compared to Brett Easton Ellis, and I can see that it is a couple of decades ago that I read Less Than Zero by Ellis. I also see a come thread in German literature the Past ghost of family being Nazis haunting the present. It is also a road trip , a family drama with a large chunk of black humour. This book would make a great movie The mother would suit a German Maggie Smith if there is such a thing one of those great character actors that can capture a sort of upper class aserbicness like a Nazi Violet Crawley mixed with the queen mother in a jaunt thri=ough her and her sons past. The Father was working for the German Rupert Murdoch, and the book is a mix of a journey and a memoir of his life. It’s a book about money facing your own family’s past and how to cope with that in the present. Have any of you read his debut novel, Fraserland, which I think hadn’t yet been translated to English, which is a shame, well, according to the Wiki page.
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