Eurotrash: A Novel

by Christian Kracht, Daniel Bowles (Translator)

Overview

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025

A probing masterpiece-in-miniature of self-reflection and cultural reckoning.

The Times [UK] • 12 Best Books of 2024
Financial Times • Best Books of 2024 [Fiction in Translation]
A Vanity Fair "Can't Miss Novel to Read"
Literary Hub • Best Book Covers of October 2024

From “the great German-language writer of his generation” (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Christian Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian” (the first was his bestselling debut, Faserland). Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has returned to care for his eighty-year-old mother after her discharge from a psychiatric institution. Confronting the dark shadows of his family’s past—particularly his grandfather’s strong ties with the Nazi regime—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, he sets off on a road trip with her. As they traverse Switzerland together in a hired cab, mother and son attempt to give away her vast fortune, stuffed in a large plastic bag, to random strangers.

By turns disturbing, disorienting, hilarious, and poignant, and brilliantly rendered in English by prize-winning translator Daniel Bowles, Eurotrash tells an intensely personal and unsparingly critical story of contemporary culture; a story that shows us a writer at the pinnacle of his powers of insight and observation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324094579
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/22/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Christian Kracht’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages. His novel Imperium won the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize in 2012. He lives in Zurich with his wife and daughter.
Daniel Bowles’s translation of Imperium won the Goethe-Institut’s Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 2016. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

2024-07-19
The belated second installment of the Swiss novelist’s semiautobiographical remembrance of his wealthy family’s Nazi-stained past.

In Kracht’sFaserland (1995), the young author of a novel with that title wandered across Europe, kissing off the 1980s with his aimlessness and addictions. Picking up where that book left off, Kracht’s sequel begins in Zurich, where the fictional novelist, Christian, goes to care for his 80-year-old mother, newly released from a mental institution. Subsisting on vodka and barbiturates, she is, “like Miss Havisham, caught in a spider web of resentment, fury, and loneliness.” So, in his cynical fashion, is Christian, still grappling with childhood abuses. His mother’s malicious bag of tricks included feigning death on the laundry room floor. When not dancing to Dietrich in women’s clothing, his father lived to torment and debase others. And Christian’s maternal grandfather was an active Nazi sympathizer. Christian, who loves his mother despite everything, decides to take her on a long road trip in a hired car before putting her back in the mental hospital. During the journey, we learn that he wore makeup from the age of 13 to 27, wishes he had David Bowie’s crooked teeth, and prefers spy thrillers to the intellectual classics his mother tries to force on him. He uses the trip to give away her vast savings, “money we had swindled from arms factories,” and she hopes to see an edelweiss flower for the first time. A leading figure in European postmodernism, the 57-year-old Kracht offsets Christian’s rock-generation disillusionment with charged language. As entertaining as that is, this novel feels incomplete. It needs to be read with its short predecessor—and its possible successor(s)—to achieve lasting power.

Set largely during a long car trip, a mother-and-son novel with compelling psychological gear shifts but not enough traction.

Kirkus Reviews