First published in Germany in 2021; published in translation by Liveright on October 22, 2024
The narrator in Eurotrash shares the name of the novel’s author. Whether the story is autobiographical I don’t know, although the narrator is a writer whose first novel was Faserland, as was the first novel of the real Christian Knacht. The line between the fictional Christian and the real one is blurred when the narrator’s mother, out of the blue, asks him whether is aware that they “are being described in a book right now, like Cervantes?” Blurring the line between reality and fiction is a staple of postmodern fiction, but I can’t say it ever impresses me.
Fictional Christian’s father, like the real Christian, had a father named Christian. After World War II, Christian’s fictional father was sent to America “to learn about democracy and bring it back to a ravaged Germany.” His father invented a fictional life in America, bragging of feats he never achieved. The novel’s early pages recount Christian’s attempt to learn the truth about his father.
Like a good bit of fiction from Germany, Eurotrash tentatively explores the impact of the Nazi party on the descendants of Hitler’s faithful. Christian blames his family for doing too little to resist the Nazis (particularly a grandfather who went through denazification and returned to Germany to organize a new group of Nordic nationalists). “The people to blame for the entire misery of the world are you and me,” Christian tells his mother.
Christian’s mother celebrated her eightieth birthday in a psychiatric ward. She was released to her apartment in Zurich because (in Christian’s view) she is able to fool doctors into believing she is in sound mental health. Christian’s mother enjoys cheap white wine, vodka, and phenobarbital. Perhaps those substances scramble her brain, but they probably help her cope with the repeated rapes she endured when she was eleven.
Christian tells himself that it is “an indication of mental health to be able to adapt to such a deeply disturbed family.” Christian may be fooling himself. Although Christian visits his mother in Zurich once a month, she complains that he is not an attentive son. Christian decides to take her on a trip, with the secret goal of depositing her in a vegan commune he saw in a brochure. He plans to tell his mother that the commune is a luxury resort and then disappear.
Christian hires a driver and off they go. Christian’s mother stops at her bank and withdraws a bag full of cash for their trip. She has a colostomy bag but she just fired her housekeeper, the only person who knew how to change it. On the trip, the task falls to Christian, much to his chagrin.
The commune’s pro-Nazi philosophy is not what Christian expected. The road trip continues, to Feutersoey for trout, to the mountains to see edelweiss in bloom, to Morges to see the house where Christian’s father died, finally to a Geneva cemetery to visit the grave of Borges. Perhaps Christian will even take his mother to Africa to see zebras, something she insists she has always wanted to do. Or perhaps he will tell his mother that she is in Africa and trust that her flirtation with dementia will turn the story into reality. Or perhaps his mother simply wills her own reality into being.
While Germany’s history hovers over the story like a storm cloud, the story that eventually emerges is personal. It is the story of a mother and son, both of whom feel guilty about the absence of a firm connection. They spend most of their road trip quarreling, perhaps developing a new understanding of each other, perhaps approaching a forgiveness that goes unspoken.
Although steeped in family history, the story generates sympathy for its two central characters, notwithstanding their aggravating natures. Christian’s approach to his mother is passive-aggressive, while his mother’s approach to her son is manipulative. Christian sometimes pokes at his mother, at other times listens silently as she criticizes him: “I simply preferred silence, as everyone had preferred to swallow down and conceal and keep everything secret, for a whole dead, blind, and nasty century.” The dynamic between the characters, culminating in a surprising and ambiguously touching ending, gives the novel its tragic soul.
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