25 years ago the narrator (now 41) wrote a novel, "Faserland" that ended in Zurich. He's been visiting his mother there monthly. Now she's phoned to ask him to come straight away. She's 80+, and had been in a psychiatric ward. Her father had been in the SS, then in a denazification camp, and had been into S/M involving young Icelandic women. The narrator's godfather had been into expensive S/M. His father, Christian Kracht, rich, is 10 years dead. The narrator saw George Clare in Suffolk to find out about his father's war history.
On her 80th birthday his mother told him that a bikeshop owner raped her several times when she was 11. He was raped when 11 in a anadian Boarding School. He was eccentric as a young man, wearing make-up until at 27 he wrote his novel with the PoV of an autistic snob. He's lived in New York, Tibet, Bangkok, etc. He thinks his father was autistic. He wonders if his mother was ever mad.
While with his mother he suddenly decides to take her on a holiday. He discovers that she has a colostomy bag. She used to (and still does) pretend to be dead. She drinks. She takes out of the bank the money she gained from arms investment, planning to give it away. People try to steal their money. We're told random facts about his life with elaboration - he's married, he'd set his Elementary school on fire, Bowie's his hero, etc. He hopes the holiday will be cathartic for him.
They argue. He comforts her with stories. She says she's had a life of disappointment, that's he's a bad son and that he writes badly.In the dark they look for Borges' grave (a novel of his ended like that) They're stuck in a cable car for 2 hours and she has to change her bag.
He'd promised to take her to Africa. In the end they mostly go around Switzerland seeing places from their past. When he returns her to her home (she's been asleep during the journey back) he says it's Africa and she plays along?
Other reviews
- Marcel Theroux (Eurotrash is a knowing book, with excursions into German history and allusions to Shakespeare, myth and pop culture. Part of its charm is the voice of its narrator, a self-aware snob-insider who is anatomising the avarice and insecurity of the privileged class he was born into. ... What stops the book from being just smart-alecky is the profound tenderness and insight it brings to bear on the mother-son relationship at its heart.)
- readingmatters (I have seen other reviews brand Eurotrash as auto-fiction, but I don’t know if that is true or whether it would be more accurate to describe it as meta-fiction)
- Jason Williamson (While Kracht’s life no doubt shapes the story, the narrator is nonetheless unreliable—as was the case in Faserland—often admitting to memory lapses or by getting facts wrong, such as the title of David Bowie’s final album. Thus, while the text regularly suggests a certain autobiographical authenticity, it then undercuts its own veracity, leaving the reader to decide what to believe.)
- Mphuthumi Ntabeni (This novel is in dialogue with its predecessor, Faserland. ... 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.... 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. ... Each time they try to give away some of the money she has withdrawn from her private bank, something comes up to distract them.)
No comments:
Post a Comment