‘Eurotrash’ by Christian Kracht     (2024) – 190 pages      Translated from the German by Daniel Bowles

Autofiction is fiction that blends details of the author’s own life into a story.

In ‘Eurotrash’, Christian Kracht picks up his mother from her home in Zurich, Switzerland and they travel around Switzerland, mainly by taxi. His mother is in her eighties, and although she is now living on her own with the help of a housekeeper, she had previously been committed to the Winterthur Psychiatric Hospital where she spent her eightieth birthday.

“She drank from her cup and looked at me. Her eyes were the eyes of my mother and at the same time the eyes of an insane old woman.”

The Christian Kracht in the novel does not have a good opinion of his own family. His grandfather was a Nazi SS man during the Hitler reign and was unrepentant after the war. His mother had been locked up in an insane asylum. His father liked to show off to others his wealth and power.

“And I wondered whether my entire family fed off the humiliation of others, whether they defined themselves through an elitism that was merely the air of a middle class wanting to ascend to the upper class, afraid of nothing more than its own proletarian background.”

If I were to choose one word to describe Christian’s attitude in ‘Eurotrash’, it would be “mordant”. He has a wry somewhat caustic view of his family and himself.

“My goodness, this life, what a perfidious, sordid, miserable melodrama it was.”

And Christian also has a cynical attitude toward Switzerland itself.

“This country, Switzerland that is, didn’t even exist until the English invented it at the end of the eighteenth century, she had said, until it was captured on postcards, as a panorama. as a sight, as a view…that’s when the Swiss saw how easily money could be made from their pleasant vistas, which until then they hadn’t found to be anything special, but if foreigners wanted to pay for them, why not.”

And then there is Christian’s sardonic view of the places he and his mother travel to on their road trip.

“I had always hated Geneva, that dreadful, phony, ice-cold Protestant city, full of poseurs and braggarts and bean counters. Calvingrad is what we’d always called Geneva. I preferred Zurich a hundred thousand times more.”

But as the road trip progresses, a warmth develops between this son and this old woman, his mother, with all her obvious mental and physical problems.

I have had my problems reading autofiction in the past. It is not one of my favorite genres. But ‘Eurotrash’ is an exceptionally good autofiction, perhaps because its ambitions aren’t so high, just a road trip with a son and his mother.

Grade:    A