Description

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A probing masterpiece-in-miniature of self-reflection and cultural reckoning.

From “the great German-language writer of his generation” (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian” (the first was his best-selling 1995 debut, Faserland). Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has arrived to care for his eighty-year-old mother after her discharge from a mental institution. Reckoning with his family’s dark history—his long-dead grandfather was intimately associated with and unapologetically supportive of the Nazis—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, Christian sets off on a road-trip with her. As they traverse Switzerland in a hired cab, mother and son attempt to give away her vast fortune, which they’re carrying in a large plastic bag, to random strangers. By turns disturbing, disorienting, hilarious, and poignant, Eurotrash tells an intensely personal and unsparingly critical story of contemporary culture; a story that shows us a writer at the pinnacle of his powers of insight and observation.

About the Author

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Christian Kracht’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages. His novel Imperium won the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize in 2012. He lives in Zurich with his wife and daughter.

Daniel Bowles’s translation of Imperium won the Goethe-Institut’s Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 2016. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.