{"id":195256,"date":"2025-04-20T19:45:09","date_gmt":"2025-04-20T19:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/entertainment\/books\/reading-progress-a-review-eurotrash-by-christian-kracht-annabookbel\/"},"modified":"2025-04-20T19:45:09","modified_gmt":"2025-04-20T19:45:09","slug":"reading-progress-a-review-eurotrash-by-christian-kracht-annabookbel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=195256","title":{"rendered":"Reading progress & a review -Eurotrash by Christian Kracht \u2013 AnnaBookBel"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

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\u201cO tempora, o mores<\/em>\u201d as Cicero said. Can you believe the state that a certain orange person and his sidekicks have gotten us into? I\u2019m not going to get into politics here though. <\/p>\n

My reading has also suffered. I twisted my knee in early Feb, it didn\u2019t 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 \u2013 BUPA \u2013 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\u2019s the business inside the back of the knee that\u2019s refusing to settle. Cortisone injections to come I think, as there didn\u2019t seem to be any tears to the meniscus, ligaments etc. Crossed fingers.<\/p>\n

The result of this is my reading is way down, because I\u2019ve been very tired. I\u2019m sleeping badly \u2013 the knee is so uncomfortable in bed! I can\u2019t believe I\u2019ve only finished 21 books to the end of March, which is still a lot by most peoples\u2019 standards, but at the same time last year I\u2019d read 31. But in the scheme of things it doesn\u2019t matter really, except that books are coming in faster than going out! <\/p>\n

I also have a review pile to catch up on, and now I\u2019m on Easter hols, and the School Mag which I edit has gone to the printers, there\u2019s time to catch up a bit.<\/p>\n

Translated from the German by Daniel Bowles<\/h3>\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2019t 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!<\/p>\n

There were two things about Kracht\u2019s 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\u2019d never heard of Kracht, (he\u2019s 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\u2026 so I did, but have only just got around to reviewing it. <\/p>\n

What I didn\u2019t expect was a work of metafiction based on the author\u2019s own life. This isn\u2019t obvious from the blurb, but once you learn the narrator\u2019s name is Christian, we\u2019re away. The main theme is mothers and sons, with a strong sideline in bad family history. <\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\n

She\u2019d always told me, my mother, that she could no longer swim in Lake Zurich, ever since Margie J\u00fcrgens, 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\u2019d swallow a bit of lake water by accident while swimming, and then she\u2019d be drinking Margie, and that was a ghastly notion to her.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019t flash the cash for his new wife:<\/p>\n

\n

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 Herm\u00e8s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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 \u2013 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\u2019s when his mother says she needs to pee that he gets a big shock \u2013 she has a colostomy bag \u2013 he didn\u2019t know. But she doesn\u2019t know how to change it, her carers did that\u2026 They stop at an awful hotel where people try to steal her money \u2013 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. <\/p>\n

Not having read Kracht\u2019s first book, which he alludes to in this text, Faserland<\/em>, 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 \u2013 acknowledging but moving on from it. However, Eurotrash<\/em> is too darkly comedic to make the shortlist I think.<\/p>\n

Source: Own copy. <\/strong> Serpent\u2019s Tail flapped paperback 2024, 190 pages. BUY at Blackwell\u2019s<\/a><\/strong> via my affiliate link, free UK P&P.<\/p>\n

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Like this:<\/h3>\n

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\u201cO tempora, o mores\u201d as Cicero said. Can you believe the state that a certain orange person and his sidekicks have gotten us into? I\u2019m not going to get into politics here though. My reading has also suffered. 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