An extract from Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles
A jaded journalist takes his spiky mother and her ill-gotten wealth on a road trip in this tragicomic and absurd semi-autobiographical novel
A jaded writer takes his spiky mother and her ill-gotten wealth on a road trip in this tragicomic and absurd semi-autobiographical novel
Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, a middle-aged man embarks on a dubious road trip through Switzerland with his 80-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.
Christian Kracht
About the Author
Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist whose work has been translated into 30 languages. He lives in Zurich
Daniel Bowles
About the Translator
Daniel Bowles is a scholar and translator of German-language fiction and works of nonfictionThe bitterly funny account of a writer driving his crotchety, senile mother through the landscape outside Zurich. One of the most entertaining and moving stories we read
— The 2025 judges on Eurotrash
What the judges said
‘Eurotrash is the auto-fictional account of a writer contemplating his unpleasant and abusive childhood, his morally repugnant ancestry and his toxic financial inheritance as he drives his crotchety, alcoholic, senile mother through the landscape outside Zurich. This doesn’t sound like much fun! But this book is one of the most entertaining and ultimately moving stories we read. It is brilliantly, bitterly funny, even as it documents a vicious and tarnished emotional universe. This book is immaculately and wittily translated; on every page its sentences sparkle and surprise like guilty-legacy gold.’
What the critics said
Marcel Theroux, The Guardian
Short but hefty, Eurotrash is a book about ageing that’s steeped in a guilty knowingness about privilege, wealth and the 20th century. There’s something bracing about the narrator’s pained awareness that if there’s such a thing as the wrong side of history, he and his family are firmly on it. As he and his mother drive on, searching for their elusive catharsis, it does occasionally feel like the book is becoming baggy, but the clever ending snapped it into a shape that seemed retrospectively inevitable and left me with a lump in my throat.
Morten Hoi Jensen, The Washington Post
‘Daniel Bowles has produced a glitteringly metaphorical translation, rich with delights: the mother’s skin has “the texture of dry silk”; the taillights of cars during a downpour are “mirrored in the puddles, orange-red and episodic, like little wet flames.” The narrator’s mother is an unforgettable literary creation, and scenes in which he serves as a nurse for her potentially embarrassing health needs are quite genuinely moving. Psychogarbage or not, “Eurotrash” is a brilliant and unsettling reckoning with history and memory, and with the ambiguities inherent in the art of writing fiction in the first place. “Come on, tell me a story,” the mother says at one point. “Truth or fiction?” the narrator asks. “It doesn’t matter.”’
Toby Lichtig, The Wall Street Journal
‘Money, class, hierarchy, the art market—Christian is an iconoclast about it all. And reprehensible as these broken figures are in their misused privilege, they are merely, Mr. Kracht seems to suggest, extremes on a continuum. The author has previously been accused of flippancy, for his fetishization of consumerism (“Faserland” was much concerned with Barbour jackets) and for the flattening effects of his all-consuming satire. But this flippancy is a mirror to society; it might even be a call to consciousness. “Eurotrash” is a cautionary tale of corrupted families in corrupted systems that churn out corrupted individuals. It is also an unremitting hoot.’
Houman Barekat, The Sunday Times
‘With its contrived premise, heavy-handed symbolism and flippant mingling of sombre and comic registers, Eurotrash reads like a wry send-up of a saturated genre. And yet swathes of it are evidently sincere. The novel, in short, is both too silly to be serious, and too serious to be silly. All bases are covered; all critiques forestalled.’
Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times
‘Such a fearless prose-stylist deserves an equally fearless translator, and in Daniel Bowles, Kracht has once again found a perfect partner. Depictions of the “calm, velveteen rattling of my mother”, or of politicians that “had been riven, had been rotten and ruined by their appalling power”, make Eurotrash not only a hilariously unsettling road-trip of a novel, but also an exhilarating read in its English-language rendition.’
