{"id":522903,"date":"2024-03-27T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=522903"},"modified":"2024-03-26T21:43:33","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T20:43:33","slug":"eurotrash-between-family-novel-and-cathartic-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/literature\/eurotrash-between-family-novel-and-cathartic-work\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00abEurotrash\u00bb, between family novel and cathartic work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently translated from the German, Bernese author Christian Kracht's 2021 novel returns to the seemingly clean Swiss soil of his childhood. An exploration of filial ties and the meaning of ancestry, set against a backdrop of money and Nazism.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Eurotrash<\/em> is one of those novels that can be classified as autofiction, in which author and narrator merge. Here, we can't distinguish truth from falsehood, but in the end, it doesn't matter, because the journey Christian Kracht takes us on is so delectable. The text opens with Christian Kracht in a daze: he has to find his demented mother in the affluent suburbs of Zurich and get her to tell him the truth, perhaps because he can feel death approaching her cold hands. And so begins a long journey down memory lane, starting with a village in the Bernese Oberland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An exploration of family history<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In this very Swiss context, sometimes bordering on caricature, mother and son try to exorcise the past, populated by money and overshadowed by the memory of an SS grandfather. A mixture that provoked shame and guilt, for while the bank account was always positive, we discover that Kracht's father was a \u00abparvenu\u00bb who never knew how to appropriate the manners of the individuals he wanted to resemble, while the grandfather's Nazi antecedents locked his descendants in a form of inextricable illegitimacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00abHe may have learned that when lunching at Simpson's in the Strand, you had to slip a few coins into the pocket of the white apron of the slicer pushing the silver roast beef cart to the table, but my father's bespoke English suits still retained the smell of working-class Germany and, worse still, the manners of the parvenu.\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n