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Eurotrash

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About this listen

'Odd and evocative, a frolicking rumination' TIMES CRITICS' BEST BOOK OF 2024

'Hilarious, unsettling and unexpectedly moving' FINANCIAL TIMES BEST TRANSLATED BOOK OF 2024

'Resonant and spiky' DAILY MAIL

'Brilliantly caustic' i PAPER

Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, a middle-aged man embarks on a dubious road trip through Switzerland with his eighty-year-old mother, recently discharged from a mental institution. Traversing the country in a hired cab, they attempt to give away the wealth she has amassed from investing in the arms industry, but a fortune of such immensity is surprisingly hard to squander. Haunted in different ways by the figure of her father, an ardent supporter of Nazism, mother and son can no longer avoid delving into the darkest truths about their past.

Eurotrash is a bitterly funny, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. The pair's tragicomic quest is punctuated by the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another. Intensely personal and unsparingly critical, Eurotrash is a disorientingly brilliant novel by a writer at the pinnacle of his powers.

Praise for Christian Kracht:

'Christian Kracht is the great German-language writer of his generation' Joshua Cohen

©2024 Christian Kracht (P)2024 Profile Books Ltd Contemporary Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Funny Witty
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This novel presents an accurate and unflinching portrayal of contemporary Switzerland and of Germany's past. It successfully blends autofiction, travelogue, comedy and tragedy and serves as a meditation on the moral responsibilities of individuals living through morally compromised times. The two protagonists, a mother and son, are Swiss, but of German origin. The woman must - literally - carry the "shit" of her family's Nazi past, symbolised by a colostomy bag, as well as a bag stuffed with tainted Swiss money, withdrawn from a private bank where she had invested in the arms industry. During their journey, her son must help her to dispose of both forms of "shit", German and Swiss. Although the novel shares similarities with Bret Easton Ellis's works in its sarcastic tone and use of an unreliable narrator, Eurotrash diverges significantly from Ellis in its lack of nihilism and, more importantly, narcissism. In fact, unlike Ellis, who does not allow anyone but his alter ego to take centre stage, in Eurotrash the dialogue between mother and son shifts the focus from one character to the other with the woman emerging as the most interesting one. To conclude, I'll echo Borges's (fake?) quotation: "If you love Switzerland, don't go there"!

An unflinching portrayal of Switzerland today

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It is great to see a contemporary European literary novel like this in translation on Audible. There isn’t much plot, but the novel is nevertheless engaging. Bleak, cold, funny, and ultimately surprisingly moving. The narration is just right.

More such translations please

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