Eurotrash
The internationally bestselling cult hit of the season
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE 2025
'Odd and evocative, a frolicking rumination' TIMES CRITICS' BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Hilarious, unsettling and unexpectedly moving' FINANCIAL TIMES BEST TRANSLATED BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Astonishing and captivating' KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD
'Christian Kracht is the great German-language writer of his generation' JOSHUA COHEN
Realising he and she are the 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. Driving across the country, they attempt to give away her arms-industry wealth, but a fortune of such immensity is 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 an unsparingly funny, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning, a tragicomic quest punctuated by the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another.
'There's a refreshing, bright moral clarity to Eurotrash' NELL ZINK
'Brilliantly caustic' i PAPER
TRANSLATED BY DANIEL BOWLES
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's autofiction on the autobahn in this incendiary outing from Kracht (Imperium). A middle-aged writer named Christian Kracht visits his mother in Zurich, where she's been living alone and subsisting on vodka, phenobarbital, and cheese slices since divorcing her rich husband. Disgusted by the "city of poseurs and braggarts and debasements," by his estimation, he proposes a road trip, determined to coax her out of her claustrophobic apartment and her "spider web of resentment, fury, and loneliness." She accepts, on the condition that he help her "squander" a substantial amount of cash from her bank account, and he agrees ("the only way to deal with money sensibly was to give it away," Christian reflects). Thanks to their liberally paid taxi driver, they visit an eerie commune, head to the mountains in search of wild edelweiss, and visit Borges's grave in Geneva, the only city Christian detests more than Zurich. All the while, the two warily circle around their simmering resentments and Christian's disgust with his "dead and soulless" family's Nazi connections. A playful tale of reconciliation that never becomes saccharine, this is one readers won't want to miss.
