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:	9781324094562
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/22/2024
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

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

★ 08/05/2024

It’s autofiction on the autobahn in this incendiary outing from Kracht (Imperium). A middle-aged writer named Christian Kracht visits his mother in Zurich, where she’s been living alone and subsisting on vodka, phenobarbital, and cheese slices since divorcing her rich husband. Disgusted by the “city of poseurs and braggarts and debasements,” by his estimation, he proposes a road trip, determined to coax her out of her claustrophobic apartment and her “spider web of resentment, fury, and loneliness.” She accepts, on the condition that he help her “squander” a substantial amount of cash from her bank account, and he agrees (“the only way to deal with money sensibly was to give it away,” Christian reflects). Thanks to their liberally paid taxi driver, they visit an eerie commune, head to the mountains in search of wild edelweiss, and visit Borges’s grave in Geneva, the only city Christian detests more than Zurich. All the while, the two warily circle around their simmering resentments and Christian’s disgust with his “dead and soulless” family’s Nazi connections. A playful tale of reconciliation that never becomes saccharine, this is one readers won’t want to miss. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Hilariously unsettling . . . Beneath the acrid humour and the furious invective there develops a genuine tenderness in the relationship between Christian and his mother. . . . Such a fearless prose-stylist deserves an equally fearless translator, and in Daniel Bowles, Kracht has once again found a perfect partner."

Financial Times - Ángel Gurría-Quintana

"Eurotrash is a knowing book, with excursions into German history and allusions to Shakespeare, myth, and pop culture. Part of its charm is the voice of its narrator, a self-aware snob-insider who is anatomising the avarice and insecurity of the privileged class he was born into... spikily contemptuous of the opulence it depicts and narrated by a more literate and self-aware version of Kendall Roy. The translator Daniel Bowles does a great job here and throughout, rendering the prose into a vivid English that feels both idiomatic and inventive... Short but hefty, Eurotrash is a book about ageing that’s steeped in a guilty knowingness about privilege, wealth and the 20th century. There’s something bracing about the narrator’s pained awareness that if there’s such a thing as the wrong side of history, he and his family are firmly on it."

The Guardian - Marcel Theroux

"Slim, hilarious, and devastating . . . Eurotrash, which comes to us in a lithe translation by Daniel Bowles, is an absurdist, tragicomic double act. Its sensibility is steeped in Continental elegance, plunder, blood and ennui . . . Eurotrash is a cautionary tale of corrupted families in corrupted systems that churn out corrupted individuals. It is also an unremitting hoot."

Wall Street Journal - Toby Lichtig

"A frolicking rumination on waning parent-child relationships and the struggles of approaching the final chapter of life."

The Times [UK]

"Eurotrash is funny and cruel and full of moments that will catch you so by surprise with pathos and irony that your breath will catch in your throat. It’s a novel nimbly built upon a series of delicate balances... This novel is an incredible reckoning."

Chris Lee

"There’s a refreshing bright moral clarity to Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash. Less than eighty years ago, grandpa was enslaving people to death. So when you learn that your share is 14 million Swiss Francs, how do you make it right?"

Nell Zink

"Eurotrash is quite simply a joy to read. Daniel Bowles has produced a glitteringly metaphorical translation, rich with delights: the mother’s skin has “the texture of dry silk”; the taillights of cars during a downpour are “mirrored in the puddles, orange-red and episodic, like little wet flames.” The narrator’s mother is an unforgettable literary creation, and scenes in which he serves as a nurse for her potentially embarrassing health needs are quite genuinely moving. Psychogarbage or not, Eurotrash is a brilliant and unsettling reckoning with history and memory, and with the ambiguities inherent in the art of writing fiction in the first place."

Morten Hoi Jensen

"Whether he’s fictionalizing history in order to question the validity of history or fictionalizing himself in order to question the validity of self, it is by now apparent to me and to his many readers that Christian Kracht is the great German-language writer of his generation."

Joshua Cohen

"Christian Kracht is a master of beautifully constructed sentences, the elegance of which conceals dread. His novels are about Germany, about ghosts, about war and delusion and every conceivable horror, but they are also full of melancholy comedy, and they all contain a hidden secret that you never quite get to the bottom of."

Daniel Kehlmann

"Reading Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash is like holding up a mirror to another mirror and admiring the infinite reflections… In this book that lies between a novel and a fictionalized history, the author presents an uncanny level of self-awareness… Though the made-up Kracht and his mother could not be described as good people, you can’t help but sympathize with them in the end."

New Statesman - Zuzanna Lachendro

"Christian Kracht began his storied career as Germanic literature’s late-capitalist enfant terrible, then somehow—stealthily, almost magically—transformed himself into its conscience. Eurotrash is Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction with a sense of humor."

John Wray

"Incendiary . . . A playful tale of reconciliation that never becomes saccharine, this is one readers won’t want to miss."

Publisher’s Weekly

09/01/2024

In his new novel, Kracht (The Dead), winner of the Swiss Book Prize, turns the concept of the road trip on its head. The narrator, who is also named Kracht (and shares the author's first name as well), embarks on a journey through Switzerland with his 80-year-old mother, who is addicted to drugs and alcohol. Since his mother's wealth primarily comes from investing in the arms industry, mother and son decide to divest themselves of as much money as possible in protest of the violence of the business. As the story proceeds, readers learn that while they live in Switzerland, they are of German ancestry and have a disturbing family history. Kracht's maternal grandfather, a devoted Nazi, indulged in sadomasochism. By insisting to the Russians that he was a socialist, he later rose through the ranks in East Germany. The road trip provides the means for mother and son to relive their past, learn about each other, and exhibit affection, irritation, and anger with each other and with the world around them. The novel moves back and forth through time with hallucinogenic intensity. VERDICT In this work of autofiction, Kracht deftly reveals the narrator's conflict and guilt.—Jacqueline Snider

Library Journal

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

"Some literary reputations take shape over decades; others, like Christian Kracht’s arrive fully formed. Kracht has become a much surer writer in the last thirty years. He has more ideas, more voices, a more varied emotional palate at his disposal. The addition of Kracht’s mother in particular, as an object of observation, interlocutor, and emotional core opens up Eurotrash. The book’s most jolting and darkly amusing chapters are the early ones in which Christian recounts his family’s entanglements with National Socialism. Kracht’s latest, Eurotrash, out now with Liveright, ties together all of these dangling threads of his literary output—the louche, self-absorbed jet-setter, the historical fabulist, the remixer of cultural and national identity."

Baffler - Michael Lipkin

"This is a provocative take on elite European culture: a large still-life of dust-lined objects, each with its own toxic history, its uses and representations; an invisible gravity measurable in language."

The Times Literary Supplement (UK) - Alexander Leissle