Christian Kracht, Eurotrash, translated by Daniel Bowles, Allen & Unwin, $26.99
It’s been pretty evident for decades now that the high and mighty German language writers loom very large indeed. Think of Elfriede Jelinek and the sea of shattered diamonds that makes The Piano Teacher the masterpiece it is. Think of the spiralling blackness and power of Thomas Bernhard as if the melodic monotonies of Gertrude Stein had melded with the rhythmic rant of Dostoyevsky’s underground man. Think too of the way W.G. Sebald took the documentary as his plaything as a poet might take life. Think of the virtuoso mesmeric quality of Daniel Kelhmann with a new book like The Director out soon.
German, for heaven’s sake, can look like the language of the gods, twilit, epical or what you will. Now we have Christian Kracht, Swiss German and original to an all but blinding effect. His earlier book Imperium was described by Karl Ove Knausgård as “astonishing and captivating” and those words apply to Eurotrash, a weird intoxication of a book about a semi-reluctant son, his “mad” mother (resident at her own behest in a mental hospital) and the adventures they have – like a legendary pair who take on windmills.
Late in the piece the middle-aged hero, who goes to see his 80-year-old mother every second month refers to “the Esperanto of eurotrash” and this extraordinary book full of fantastic gestures and a whole grammar of derangement gives him the right to this work of fiction which captures the sinister shadows of the past in a way that seems for the longest stretch to make no sense but which eventually moves plangently, sometimes hilariously, as mother and son (against all the odds), discover their love for each other in the midst of chaos and craziness.
Eurotrash is a bit like the fiction of Edward St Aubyn in that it flaunts a high style that soars above (and below) the details of the story that is being told as if any compromise in the direction of clarity would be a betrayal. Its narrative logic is symboliste in the poetic sense – not the thing but the effect of the thing in the mind – but that lofty evasion of meaning, that sort of Eliotic or Mallarmean avoidance of meaning is a screen for every dark and ditzy thing Christian Kracht has in store for us. Much of it stretches credibility but it also