Description

By (author) Kracht Christian; Translated by Bowles Daniel

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A rambunctious, tragicomic absurd road trip novel about a wealthy Swiss-German mother and son

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”Odd and evocative, a frolicking rumination” TIMES CRITICS” BEST BOOK OF 2024”Hilarious, unsettling and unexpectedly moving”FINANCIAL TIMES BEST TRANSLATED BOOK OF 2024”Resonant and spiky” DAILY MAIL”Brilliantly caustic” i PAPERRealising he and she are the very 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. Traversing the country in a hired cab, they attempt to give away the wealth she has amassed from investing in the arms industry, but a fortune of such immensity is surprisingly 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 a bitterly funny, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. The pair”s tragicomic quest is punctuated by the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another. Intensely personal and unsparingly critical, Eurotrash is a disorientingly brilliant novel by a writer at the pinnacle of his powers.Praise for Christian Kracht:”Christian Kracht is the great German-language writer of his generation” Joshua Cohen”Astonishing and captivating” Karl Ove KnausgaardTRANSLATED BY DANIEL BOWLES

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Resonant and spiky

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Brilliantly caustic

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Not only moving and uplifting, but strangely funny … Eurotrash is a knowing book

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Very funny and very precisely written

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Quite simply a joy to read … The narrator”s mother is an unforgettable literary creation and Eurotrash is a brilliant and unsettling reckoning with history and memory, and with the ambiguities inherent in the art of writing fiction

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Steeped in knowing irony … makes for enjoyable reading

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Hilarious, unsettling and unexpectedly moving

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Odd and evocative, a frolicking rumination

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Reading Christian Kracht”s Eurotrash is like holding up a mirror to another mirror and admiring the infinite reflections

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Deliciously disrespectful … not only a hilariously unsettling road-trip of a novel, but also an exhilarating read

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Praise for Christian Kracht:Whether he”s fictionalizing history in order to question the validity of history, or fictionalizing himself in order to question the validity of self, it is by now apparent to me and to his many readers that Christian Kracht is the great German-language writer of his generation.

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Christian Kracht is a master of the well-formed sentence, the elegance of which conceals horror.His novels involve Germany, ghosts, war and madness, and every conceivable fright, but they are also full of melancholy comedy, and they all hide a secret that one never quite fathoms.

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Imperium is astonishing and captivating, a tongue-in-cheek Conradian literary adventure for our time.

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The Dead is a story of love and sadness in times when the weak were broken by the unforgiving ideologies of fascism and National Socialism . . . I read The Dead twice in a row, first for the story and then for the beauty of the prose.

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To say a word about Christian Kracht”s Imperium would be like engraving Goethe”s Conversations of German Refugees into an orange seed. Or perhaps into a coconut? … An adventure novel. No doubt. That there even is s