“O tempora, o mores” as Cicero said. Can you believe the state that a certain orange person and his sidekicks have gotten us into? I’m not going to get into politics here though.
My reading has also suffered. I twisted my knee in early Feb, it didn’t feel a bad one, but after a month of it getting worse rather than better, I found a walking stick and went the GP, then the X-ray – BUPA – MRI scan route and have a follow up consultant appt midweek to discuss the scans. I already know the X-ray showed some arthritis in the joint, but it’s the business inside the back of the knee that’s refusing to settle. Cortisone injections to come I think, as there didn’t seem to be any tears to the meniscus, ligaments etc. Crossed fingers.
The result of this is my reading is way down, because I’ve been very tired. I’m sleeping badly – the knee is so uncomfortable in bed! I can’t believe I’ve only finished 21 books to the end of March, which is still a lot by most peoples’ standards, but at the same time last year I’d read 31. But in the scheme of things it doesn’t matter really, except that books are coming in faster than going out!
I also have a review pile to catch up on, and now I’m on Easter hols, and the School Mag which I edit has gone to the printers, there’s time to catch up a bit.
Translated from the German by Daniel Bowles
I see that this novel has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize this year. Although I do enjoy reading in translation a lot, often, when I look at the longlist for this prize, I don’t see many books that I would want to read straight off. This year, there are two. This one, and Hiromi Kawakami, the latter amazingly being effectively SF!
There were two things about Kracht’s novel that made me pick it up in the bookshop. One was the title, immediately reminding me of the late night C4 series of the same name and the other was the cover photo showing people sunbathing and going lobster-red on the ski-slopes. I’d never heard of Kracht, (he’s Swiss), but the blurb promised comedy and a road-trip, so I handed over my money and purchased it, thinking to save it for German Lit Month and Novellas in November, but LIzzie encouraged me to read it for #ReadIndies… so I did, but have only just got around to reviewing it.
What I didn’t expect was a work of metafiction based on the author’s own life. This isn’t obvious from the blurb, but once you learn the narrator’s name is Christian, we’re away. The main theme is mothers and sons, with a strong sideline in bad family history.
The narrator is guilt-tripped into returning to Zurich to visit his eighty-year-old mother, recently discharged from a mental institution. While gearing himself up to visit her apartment, he muses darkly, about his father who had left his mother the lesser works in their art collection after their divorce, about his Nazi grandfather, and his mother who has been in and out of Winterthur for years, and some of her funny ways like:
She’d always told me, my mother, that she could no longer swim in Lake Zurich, ever since Margie Jürgens, her best friend, had employed the Swiss company Exit for her assisted suicide and decreed that her ashes then 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.
There are loads of these funny stories, interspersed with darker more introspective fare from our narrator. He continues to think about his father who was always trying to raise himself socially, but wouldn’t flash the cash for his new wife:
And when he died, my stepmother, his last wife, took the Learjet from Geneva to the memorial service in Hamburg, on her lap the long-coveted thirty-five-thousand-euro Birkin handbag that my father had always forbidden her to own. Inside, inside this Hermès purse, lay his ashes, in a plastic bag, ashes she later hurled from a tugboat off Hamburg-Finkenwerder into the river Elbe: both the plastic bag and the ashes into the filthy Elbe.
He eventually plucks up courage to visit his mother, who asks him to take her to the bank, where she cashes in all her savings. She intends to spend it all, or give it all away – and wants to be taken on a luxury trip to Africa. They find a taxi driver who given 1000F is very happy to take them wherever Christian directs, staying in Switzerland. It’s when his mother says she needs to pee that he gets a big shock – she has a colostomy bag – he didn’t know. But she doesn’t know how to change it, her carers did that… They stop at an awful hotel where people try to steal her money – but the taxi driver can actually be relied upon! They get out of trouble. And this sequence repeats itself a few times before he delivers her back to the mental institution. There is a quite funny running joke in that Christian keeps being mistaken for author Daniel Kehlmann.
Not having read Kracht’s first book, which he alludes to in this text, Faserland, which I understand also involves a road trip, I found this novel entertaining rather than repetitive, and though Kracht rather brave to put his family history out there – acknowledging but moving on from it. However, Eurotrash is too darkly comedic to make the shortlist I think.
Source: Own copy. Serpent’s Tail flapped paperback 2024, 190 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link, free UK P&P.
