
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles (Publisher: Liveright, 2024)
- Mphuthumi Ntabeni writes a regular book column for LitNet.
Title: Eurotrash
Author: Christian Kracht
Publisher: Liveright (2024)
ISBN: 9781324094562
Eurotrash, by the Swiss-German author Christian Kracht, is a novel of ideas and what the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). It is about the grinding burden of having been born into tainted privilege, and the engulfing guilt that comes with that self-realisation. The book is not mawkish, mercifully, and is often told in a self-deprecating tone and acrid humour. But don’t expect much story beyond the navel-gazing of a young man who decides to take his elderly mother on a last trip in the Germanic lands. This rouses their clashing personalities, and stimulates moments of (muffled) self-doubt (on the part of the mother) and sometimes false moralising by the son, who has no problem cashing in on the opulence he was born into, though he is seemingly contemptuous about it. You immediately get a hint of the book’s content from an epigram about it by Jorge Luis Borges: “If you love Germany, you shouldn’t visit it.” Of course, no country has its history, shameful or otherwise, depicted on its streets like Germany.
Eurotrash is also a book that wonderfully border-crosses between genres: comedy, travelogue and tragedy. It anatomises some of the big topics of our era, like the complicity of ordinary people during tragic historical happenings, aging (how to handle the challenge of caring for an aging parent) and the indefatigable greed of late capitalism (ethical financial investment and other demands for sustainable, ethical living in the modern world). The book also tackles the conceptualisation of memory as a tool of imagination, that is, the challenge of transferring history into personalised language. Another epigram about the book, by Jiddu Krishnamurti, gives a hint of this: “What is fully, completely understood leaves no trace as memory.”
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Eurotrash is also a book that wonderfully border-crosses between genres: comedy, travelogue and tragedy. It anatomises some of the big topics of our era, like the complicity of ordinary people during tragic historical happenings, aging (how to handle the challenge of caring for an aging parent) and the indefatigable greed of late capitalism ... The book also tackles the conceptualisation of memory as a tool of imagination, that is, the challenge of transferring history into personalised language.
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This novel is in dialogue with its predecessor, Faserland. It blurs the lines of fiction and autofiction when its narrator interrogates and critiques the author of Faserland, who happens to be the present author. This is done in a manner that is wonderfully non-intrusive and nonburdensome for the reader. Kracht is an author who is devoted not only to literary historiography, or mere literary aesthetics, but to the ethical responsibilities of the author within the literary discourse. This is mostly why I find his writing mesmerising. It carries the burden of authorship to the metaphysical, non-religious realm. For example, he artistically personalises an abstract idea like Gedächtnislosigkeit (lack of memory) by making the mother of the Eurotrash narrator an alcoholic who is addicted to drugs that suppress her memory. As they travel around Switzerland, she is not prepared to confront the past, and remembers it only selectively, especially the parts where she was complicit in the tragedies of history. Due to his desire for authenticity, the young narrator, her son, tries to excavate this past. Dragging a stoma (colostomy) bag around on her waist, she is not interested in these discussions during their hastily conceived travels around the country. The stoma bag plays a metaphoric role in Kracht’s clever writing, as if she is dragging around the stink of personal and national history that he, as her son (progeny), must learn how to clean and change. The question about what we owe to history and genealogy comes out as clear as a bell from this analogy. Even the author’s choice of drug for her mother, phenobarbital, might be of significance, since the drug is used mostly for treating epilepsy. Some philosophers believe that Western phenomena like fascism, totalitarianism, etc are epileptic periods that tear asunder the respectable veneer of Western civilisation. We know that the glide of the occidental countries into fascism is now a fait accompli.
His mother wants to keep him interested in getting rid of her wealth, which she made partly by buying weapon-manufacturing stocks. He can’t wait to leave Zurich, which he calls “a city of money-grubbing middle management and depressing hustlers and reserve lieutenants” (7). Each time they try to give away some of the money she has withdrawn from her private bank, something comes up to distract them. What is clear, or what is being conveyed, is that even those to whom they try give away money – rich or poor – are themselves unethical swindlers who are up to exploit them. The last honest man is the Indian taxi driver, who drives them around at great profit to himself.
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Substitute Europe for Africa, and you have something of the quintessential common character of JM Coetzee’s autobiographical fiction: calculated, ethical subterfuge and self-confessed failure to deal with the demands of national Vergangenheitsbewältigung.
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The narrator desires authenticity and cultural and historical emancipation, and means to be rid of the suffocating emptiness of his personal and national history. This brings to the fore the biblical adage about fathers eating raw grapes and the teeth of the children being set on edge. He seeks a critical perspective of his native country, but the deliberate ignorance of his mother frustrates him. He suffers from a suffocating atmosphere of falseness due to the domestic and natural history of his country. His avaricious father was a snob and an abusive, crass, materialistic man who abandoned his mother for a younger woman during the second part of their middle age. His maternal grandfather was “a party member since 1928, Untersturmführer in the SS and employed by the Reichspropagandaleitung of the Nazis in Berlin” (7-8). She doesn’t want to confront that “arsenal of degradation”, preferring to bury everything under the alcoholic fog of cheap wine and vodka. She refuses even to talk about an incident where she was raped, only hinting at it as “a cruel perfidy radiating from the past”.
In the end, his only shelter – the raft above the internal exile of his psyche – is in literature, which he uses as a linguistic coat to protect himself against the lack of Heimat (philological home) he feels everywhere. He opts to access the past and the world through neutral landscapes, lakes and mountains. This, he feels, is the only way to lose the spirit of disenchantment. Substitute Europe for Africa, and you have something of the quintessential common character of JM Coetzee’s autobiographical fiction: calculated, ethical subterfuge and self-confessed failure to deal with the demands of national Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The narrator of Eurotrash also accuses himself – indirectly as the author of Faserland – for having gained literary acclaim at the expense of an authentic writer’s soul. I guess that this is common enough for most successful writers. I hear that Sally Rooney also suffers from something similar.
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As such, in Xhosa culture, the imbongi ... is supposed to be a shaman with a metaphysical link to the heartbeat of the nation’s zeitgeist. This link to the universal zeitgeist is what makes authors in different geographical spaces, eras and cultures sometimes speak of things in a similar manner. It is what we may call the animation of the universe’s psyche. This is what is demanded and meant by the term writer’s soul.
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The problem of representing history through literary discourse (transfer of experience into language) is something which I am able to explain only from my Xhosa Weltanschauung (worldview). The task requires not just skills, as an essayistic exposé does, or artistic genius; you need to go beyond the mnemotechnical workings of an (informed) imagination and the mere external prosthetics of literature, into the metaphysical space where memory links in poetic synergy with historiography and cultural identity. As such, in Xhosa culture, the imbongi (often wrongly defined as a praise singer) is the only one trusted for the task. This is largely because the imbongi is supposed to be a shaman with a metaphysical link to the heartbeat of the nation’s zeitgeist. This link to the universal zeitgeist is what makes authors in different geographical spaces, eras and cultures sometimes speak of things in a similar manner. It is what we may call the animation of the universe’s psyche. This is what is demanded and meant by the term writer’s soul. The imbongi must accomplish this task genuinely. SEK Mqhayi, in Xhosa lore and literature, was the modernised version of this.
Towards its last chapters, Eurotrash embodies the spectacular echoes of Borges’s style, which could make the past present through fusing the voices of a historiographer with poetic comprehension and discernment. Borges is also a prototype of an author with a writer’s soul. Kracht employs his hyperbolic writing with a fantastic, hallucinogenic intensity, queasy melancholy and emotional poignancy in a cool, beautiful manner. It’s like Foehn, the wind sweeping cold down the Alps to the dusty stink of their personal and national skeleton cupboards. I was pleased with how our hapless narrator, in the end, accepted his mother with empathy and delicacy in unjudgmental love. Africa is rousted to assist on the metaphoric level. Who else but this abused, though ever-caring, continent – with her own faults – is big enough to carry the cruel failings of her breakaway continental children? The Ngorongoro crater in Arusha is where the human life experiment began, according to archaeological research. It is fitting that there it must end also. Lastly, the book reminds us: “For everything that does not rise into consciousness will return as fate” (12).
It would be amiss were I not to praise the competent skill of the translator of this novel from Germany to English, Daniel Bowels. Not only is the English narrative freshly inventive, but it exquisitely loses some of its Deutsch convolutions.
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PenAfrican: The equality of shadows by Charl-Pierre Naudé – a book review