Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (2021)

This is a postmodern literary novel divided into thirteen numbered chapters, set in 1995 Switzerland. The book’s first-person narrator, called Christian Kracht like the author, is also the main character from Christian Kracht’s debut novel Faserland, and shares many of its topics: road trips, societal decay, Nazi Germany, drug addiction, death. The narrator here bears many similarities to the author – family history, and biographical details such as living in different countries, and having been raped as a boy in boarding school (as told by the author in interviews). The book often plays with the different levels of real life and fiction, and refers freely back to Faserland, both as part of the plot and stylistically.

In the first paragraph, the narrator recalls the story he is about to tell, which began with him travelling to Zürich at the behest of his mother. He also remembers that twenty-five years prior to this visit, he had written a story called Faserland that ends in the town. The narrator has just returned from a very poorly attended screening of Guy Debord’s last film and stops to buy a hand-knit chunky jumper from a stand run by a nature commune near Gstaad. He stops by a famous bar and thinks about how it has changed for the worse, and how he dislikes the bleak and pretentious Zürich.

The next morning, he leaves his hotel to buy champagne-coloured roses for his mother and takes a taxi to the suburbs to see her. After her divorce thirty years ago, she moved into this spacious two-level apartment in a fake Bauhaus building with views of Lake Zürich. The narrator is anxious about his mother, who is addicted to alcohol and barbiturates and periodically falls when under the influence, smashing her face open on the marble floors, being treated in the ER and then sent to a psychiatric clinic in Winterthur, returning home after a week because there is no court order to hold her. Most recently she spent her eightieth birthday in the clinic, with guests and a £600 bouquet from her son, who visits her every two months and deals with unpaid bills from luxury brands for clothes and shoes she stores – still sealed – in drawers.