Eurotrash

"I'll see you in twenty-five years." Laura Palmer.

"Well, I had to go back to Zurich for a few days. It was quite awful. Out of nervousness about it, I had been so unwell all through the long weekend that I was suffering from severe constipation. To this I must say that a quarter of a century ago I had written a story which, for some reason which now escapes me, I had called 'Faserland'. It ends in Zurich, on Lake Zurich, so to speak, relatively traumatically."

Christian Kracht's long-awaited new novel begins with a memory: 25 years ago, in "Faserland," a nameless first-person narrator (was it Christian Kracht?) wandered through a Germany abandoned by all spirits, from Sylt to across the Swiss border to Zurich. In "Eurotrash" the same narrator goes on another journey - this time not only into the interior of his own ego, but into the abysses of his own family, whose history repeatedly intersects with the history of this country in tragic, comic and sometimes spectacular ways. "Eurotrash" is a touching masterpiece of existential force and sarcastic humor.