Recommend: No<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eurotrash<\/em> had the unfortunate task of being my active book during a very difficult week at work. One of parts I like least about my job is the emotional weight that crashes down on the market when the wheels of the financial system come loose. Clients are losing money and some are losing their jobs. All around you, banks are battening down the hatches, uncertain of how long the incoming storm will hang around. Liquidity dries up. There\u2019s money to be made but the zero-sum-game nature of my job is particularly glaring \u2013 on the other side of the money we make is someone else\u2019s pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Personal life becomes squeezed into survival for traders during these periods. Lunch is a luxury. The smell of coffee hits like a tiny rush of salvation. Time at home before bed is spent staring agape at your phone while the market crashes, much like you did while you were in the office. It\u2019s really not a time for stolid contemplation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Given this was my headspace (read: toxic) during my evenings with Eurotrash<\/em>, it\u2019s not a surprise that I didn\u2019t get what I needed out of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Apparently this is a sequel to Kracht\u2019s earlier novel, Faserland<\/em>, which I didn\u2019t know at the time, and that surely didn\u2019t help either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The premise, neatly presented in the blurb, is that a middle-aged son takes his ailing eighty-year-old grandmother on a road trip around Switzerland to haphazardly dispense of their family fortune to those they meet along the way. The family lineage is German (or Swiss German, I had trouble following along with the origin story nuances) and underlying the journey are challenges to the family\u2019s history with Nazism, and more simply the challenges of family itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The way the narrative is delivered becomes increasingly metafictional. The main character is an author called Christian Kracht, who wrote a book a called Faserland<\/em> in the past. Sound familiar? This is a pretty tired trope that has been executed better elsewhere (Herman Koch, Brett Easton Ellis). When done well the self-referential narrator\/author is a lot of fun \u2013 they constantly have the audience fretting about what is real and what is fiction. However, in the case of Eurotrash, <\/em>it was just a drag, adding structural complexity but little emotional payoff. I think Kracht failed because the narrator himself was a drag. I didn\u2019t catch him doing much else other than complaining about and ruminating on his sketchy family history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first quarter of this book (50 pages) was extraordinarily slow. There are only two things that happen: a very detailed family background and then Name Game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Family history is more or less the entire plot. There\u2019s so much information in these first 50 pages and it is all quite tedious. For both sides of the family (father, mother, uncles, etc), you get their working life, political belief system and personal controversies. Yet none of these are people are linked back to our narrator, presumably because the narrator Christian Kracht is meant to closely resemble the real Christian Kracht and he doesn\u2019t want the narrator to be that closely associated with the choices of his character’s predecessors (racism, abuse, etc.). And this presents a major structural problem. All the drama of the novel has happened a generation ago, and the narrator is so reluctant to identify with it, so we as the audience just get drip fed plot points via very dulled, reluctant memories. We essentially just have to accept something bad<\/em> happened some time ago<\/em> and pretend to care about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Characters introduced in this opening quarter just float around the pages and, in the best case scenario, occasionally get mentioned again later in passing. The result being that I was finding it quite hard to follow who was associated with the SS and who had the sex dungeon. This indifference that I felt towards family history in the first section of the novel infected my ability to enjoy the later parts, where the plot does gain some fitful momentum. The blurb purports that the source of tension on the roadtrip will be that \u201cmother and son can no longer avoid delving into the darkest truths about their past\u201d.<\/em> At the risk of a lackluster plot spoiler, this premise is a lie. Every discussion between mother and son went a bit like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Son: Your father was a nazi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mother: Yeah he was a nazi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Son: How can you live with yourself that your father was a nazi?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mother: I would like trout for breakfast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s no great truth unveiled and equally there\u2019s nothing to advance us towards catharsis. We are not \u201cdelving into the darkest truths about their past\u201d \u2013 we got all that in an exposition dump at the start of the book instead \u2013 and are instead just repeating what feels like very well-worn patterns of confrontation and retreat between mother and son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh, and then there is the seemingly endless Name Game in these fifty pages. Name Game is when an author fills the page with lists upon lists, in sentences that run on forever, to build up the \u2018world\u2019 of the novel. In Eurotrash<\/em>, the family at the centre is absurdly wealthy, so there\u2019s just paragraphs upon paragraphs of luxury items and private villas on cliff faces and exclusive parties with caviar and\u2026. You see how Name Game works now, and here\u2019s just one example (of many) from the novel:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I reflected on the fact that Tiffany lamps would never again be appealing; they had been ruined for all time, these aberrant lamps, like awful Belle Epoque paintings and tapered Coca-Cola bottles and ballet dancers by Degas and handblown purplish floral Murano glass figurines and those Toulouse-Lautrec absinthe bottles.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That is just a single sentence, and I managed to completely lose the scene. Belle Epoque? Degas? Murano? Toulouse-Lautrec? And on and on, these first 50 pages limped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The story does picks up in the last half, as we eventually get on the road, and the painful discourse on family history gives way to present day scenes involving mother and son. There are some well-drawn and memorable moments, when considered in isolation. The accidental visit to a nazi-inspired modern-day cult and, separately, the time spent on top of a glacier searching for the Edelweiss flower (but only finding Indian tourists) had ironically minimalist depth. And I did really like the ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the book didn\u2019t know what it wanted to be. It had 200 pages to find its feet and it never got there. It tried sprawling family saga. It tried caustic road trip with unlikely side characters. It tried last hurrah for ageing mother. It tried metafictional conceit. None of it stuck. Which is a shame, because I really could have used some help disappearing this week, for an hour here or there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For everything that does not rise into consciousness will return as fate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1050,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1048"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1084,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions\/1084"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n