Review of Christian Kracht's Eurotrash, longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

The Hindu

30-04-2025

Some of the funniest and most poignant moments in Christian Kracht's Eurotrash (translated from the German by Daniel Bowles) involve bodily fluids. A bored cab driver distracted by his own snotty nose. A mother recalling a romantic rendezvous from her youth in graphic detail, much to her son's discomfiture.
But my personal favourite is when after a fierce argument between the protagonist (an authorial stand-in called Christian, a German novelist) and his mother, the former still has to empty out her colostomy bag because of course he does. This scene is the perfect example of the tonality Kracht uses wonderfully throughout the novel — acerbic wit mixed with bitterness and self-loathing but also an undertone of undeniable tenderness.
Much of the novel, longlisted for this year's International Booker Prize, takes place on a road trip across the characters' native of Switzerland. Christian and his mother belong to a family that has made their fortune via a supremely shady armaments business. His grandfather, even more damningly, was a Nazi officer in the infamous secret police known as SS.
The formidable, eccentric Mama Kracht, meanwhile, is very old, unfathomably rich, and likes to mix alcohol with prescription pills. When this propensity lands her in a psych ward, Christian feels like his proposed trip is a way to exorcise the family ghosts. The duo starts to give away the family's ill-gotten wealth during their road trip, just handing out cash from a plastic bag in the car.
Behind the radicalisation
As one might surmise from a plot like this, both German nationalism as well as German denial-of-history are very much on trial here. In the very first chapter, Kracht condemns the 'complete failure of the denazification process' when it came to his SS grandfather. The novel is devastating — and devastatingly funny — when it's absolutely tearing down legacies and reputations, bursting the balloon-egos of the Kracht family.
For example, Christian tells the reader that upon his grandfather's death, a great deal of BDSM paraphernalia was discovered among his things. Bitterly, he daydreams about his late grandfather introducing racialised Nazi pseudo-science even into these 'clandestine cellar trysts' with very young Icelandic women.
'For only they, this old man, my grandfather, had thought, could adequately represent the Nordic ideal. The Norwegians, the Germans, the Danes were too weak — no, it had to be Icelanders, girls whom he would invite to his home as au pairs, to Sylt, girls in whose blood the sacred Edda sang eternally.'
Black humour
The translation by Daniel Bowles is first rate, and often comes up with an unsettling metaphor or simile that absolutely nails the tragicomic tonality of the book. Besides, Kracht is obsessed with the workings of language which is a through line Bowles picks up on pretty quickly. This harmony between writer and translator manifests itself in an incendiary passage about the German language.
'It was always language itself, the liberation and simultaneous domination of the spastic glottis, that singular enigma which lay in the proper sequence of syllables. And it was always, then, the German. It had always been the German language. It had always been the scorched earth, the sufferings of ill-treated earth itself, war and the burning old city and the vegetable fields made infertile outside it. It had always been the ghetto purged with the flamethrower. It had always been the tailored, pale gray uniforms, the attractive blond officers with their ice-cube-filled gullets, whispering, smiling.'
With amusing nods to Shakespeare and Flaubert classics, not to mention the sociological theories of Guy Debord, Eurotrash is an immensely entertaining, erudite disavowal of nationalistic chest-thumping and ahistorical amnesia. It missed the International Booker shortlist — narrowly, I am sure — but is nevertheless highly recommended for those who enjoy their humour pitch-black.
The reviewer is a writer and journalist working on his first book of non-fiction.
Eurotrash Christian Kracht, trs Daniel Bowles Hachette India ₹499