One novella and one novel (so far) for German Literature Month XV.

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht

Reading this was a bit like watching Real Housewives of Anywhere – you think, ‘Do they hear and see themselves?’ (Because the wealth and privilege is obscene) And yet, you I keep watching, waiting for them to have flashes of insight, and accept that it’s mindlessly entertained along the way.

Kracht’s novella (a satire, I assume), is the story of a Swiss man, who is a successful author, and his 80-year-old mother, who is addicted to prescription drugs and bottles of 7€ supermarket wine. The family are rich – their wealth derived from investments in the arms-industry. Significantly, his mother grew up in a family linked to the Nazis – as the story unfolds her trauma-history and fragile mental health is revealed.

His mother decides to divest herself of the money and clear her conscience at the same time, so the pair go on a road trip around Switzerland, with the sole purpose of offloading cash.

While the premise was interesting, the pretentiousness was difficult to navigate – was Kracht overdoing the name-dropping to deliberately make the characters as vacuous as possible? It’s filled with references to artists and authors, ritzy destinations, designer fashion labels, and restaurant meals.

Often, when old people who have lost touch would like to suggest elegance, they resort to Bulgari… And in the dreadful luxury hotels in Marbella and Venice and Positano there were always Bulgari grooming products lying around bathrooms. Dreadful places like Qatar and Dubai were serviced by dreadful luxury airlines who likewise offered Bulgari products in their in-flight shower stalls. Over the years my mother had internalized the idea that Bulgari must embody something elegant, something desirable, while in reality these products and this name only triggered depression and thoughts of suicide. 

But these bits also made me laugh, for example when the man wonders ‘…what was ultimately worse, Brutalism or the nineties…’.

So what kept me reading? I was waiting for both characters to own their history, and the dialogue between the pair, particularly when they got into the ethics around the cash, his maternal-Nazi-loving-grandfather, and the reason why his father left his mother (the Nazis again) was good reading.

…whatever the case, my father’s smallish lies were nothing next to the established truths of my mother’s family.

Perhaps Kracht wanted to say something broadly about how we carry our history, our shame and how we reconcile that. I’m not sure that was achieved in Eurotrash, however, the man does come to an important understanding about his mother, that I think is interesting in the context of inter-generational trauma –

Perhaps the harrowing events of the past forty years, my forty years, that is, but also those of the forty years prior and the whole inexorable nuclear disaster of her life were, in her eyes, simply normalcy.

3/5

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky)

I have to preface this review by saying that I loved Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. It’s a book I still think about, seven years after reading it. Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days follows a similar structure – the death of the same unnamed female protagonist, which comes about in five different ways, and in each of the stories, the protagonist lives longer.

Small details (such as a collection of Goethe books, map coordinates and a recipe for apple strudel) appear in each of the stories to anchor the reader. Equally, the family history is repeated often enough to orient you through otherwise changing circumstances.

The book begins in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire, with the death of a baby girl. An important detail is revealed – the baby’s mother is Jewish, but married to an Anglo-Saxon man. The family’s experience of grief sets the tone for the rest of the book, with the baby’s mother questioning why it happened, and the grandmother, ‘accepting’ it –

A day on which a life comes to an end is still far from being the end of days.

In the next part, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. The remaining parts of the story follow the woman through Austria and Russia – politics, the World Wars and her family circumstances provide an evolving backdrop.

What Erpenbeck does very well in this novel is tell the story of the broader political and social landscape of the time (which ultimately spans nearly a century) through her main character.

On one particular day during the summer of ’41, she drove her pickaxe into the earth at a specific point and began to dig her own grave, without knowing, of course, that this was the exact place on all this infinite earth destined to become her dwelling for the eternal winter.

In a story with such distinct parts, it’s difficult not to favour some sections over others. For me, the first part of the book was so arresting and horrifyingly memorable that it stood out. Erpenbeck’s writing in this section – the grief and disbelief, the mother’s searching for any other outcome – was outstanding.

But what to do with all the things that resisted calculation? How much time was there really between the second when a child was alive and the next, when it was no longer alive? Was it even time separating one such moment from another? Or did it have a different name, except that no one had found the right name for it yet? How could you calculate the force dragging a child over to the realm of the dead?

It would have been easy to avoid existential questioning or examining the experience of death per se, given that we know death was the outcome of all five parts of the story, and yet Erpenbeck tackles it differently in each part. Again, the writing is exceptionally good, providing thought-provoking perspectives that align with the protagonist’s different stages of life.

At many points during her life she had done something for the last time without knowing it. Did that mean that death was not a moment but a front, one that was as long as life?

If you are planning on reading this book, I would suggest devoting some time to it initially – you need to read the first two parts to get with the structure.

4/5

* Erpenbeck’s novel was published in German in January 2012 and Atkinson’s in March 2013 – I guess they were both writing their novels around the same time!