Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles, was first published in German in 2021 and later released in English in 2024. Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, this novel is a striking mix of dark humour, satire, and family reckoning. In this Eurotrash, the story unfolds as a strange and haunting road trip across Switzerland, where a middle-aged son takes his frail, eighty-year-old mother out of a mental institution. Together, they attempt to give away the immense family fortune, wealth that carries the heavy stain of Nazi history and the arms industry. What should be a simple journey turns into a surreal and unsettling adventure, filled with absurd encounters, bleak humour, and moments of despair that expose the deep scars of family and nation alike. It is not only a family story but also a sharp reflection on history, guilt, and the question of how the past continues to shape the present.
This novel is more than just a dark family story, it is a sharp mix of autofiction, satire, and historical reflection. In this Eurotrash book, readers will discover a powerful narrative about confronting inherited guilt, family trauma, and the moral weight of privilege. The son’s inner struggle, torn between care for his mother and the shame of his family’s past, creates a narrative that is both grotesque and tender. With its biting humour, emotional intensity, and postmodern playfulness, Eurotrash stands out as one of the most thought-provoking works of translated literature in recent years, raising questions about memory, responsibility, and the way the past refuses to let go.
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Book Details and Availability
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025 and is published by Serpent’s Tail on 7 November 2024. The novel is available in English and runs to 192 pages. Readers can choose from multiple formats: the Kindle edition priced at ₹346, the paperback edition at ₹364, and the hardcover edition at ₹1934. The book is widely available through leading online platforms such as Amazon, Flipkart, and other major bookstores, making it accessible to readers in both digital and print editions.
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About Author & Translator of Eurotrash
Christian Kracht, born in Switzerland in 1966, is one of the most important voices in contemporary German-language literature. Educated in Germany, Canada, and the United States, he began his career as a journalist before turning to fiction. His debut novel Faserland (1995) marked a turning point in German pop literature, and since then he has written acclaimed works such as 1979, Imperium, The Dead, and Eurotrash. His writing blends history, satire, and cultural critique, exploring themes of identity, memory, and the absurd. Over the years, Kracht has received major literary honours, including the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize for Imperium, the Swiss Book Prize and Hermann Hesse Prize for The Dead, and the Swiss Literature Prize for Eurotrash. His novels have been translated into more than thirty languages, cementing his place as a leading figure in world literature. Kracht currently lives in Zurich with his wife, filmmaker Frauke Finsterwalder, and their daughter.
The translator of Eurotrash, Daniel Bowles, brings Kracht’s unique style into English with precision and artistry. A scholar and translator of German literature, Bowles previously won the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of Imperium. His rendering of Eurotrash has been widely praised for capturing both the dark humour and the lyrical depth of Kracht’s prose. The English edition was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, a recognition shared equally by author and translator. Bowles is also the author of The Ends of Satire: Legacies of Satire in Postwar German Writing, which reflects his deep understanding of tone, irony, and cultural history and qualities that enrich his translations.
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Themes in Eurotrash by Christian Kracht
- Family Decline: At the heart of Eurotrash lies the theme of family decline. The narrator and his eighty-year-old mother travel together, but their journey is haunted by the brokenness of their family. Past trauma, addiction, abuse, and moral collapse form the backdrop of their lives. The mother’s decline, shown in painful detail, her bruised face, her fragile body, and her state in the mental hospital which reflects the larger disintegration of a family that once carried wealth and power but now drifts toward despair. This decline is both physical and emotional, a reminder that the past cannot be erased.
- National Guilt and Historical Burden: The novel also engages deeply with Germany and Switzerland’s difficult history. The family’s wealth is tied to the war and the arms industry, showing how ordinary lives can be built on extraordinary violence. The shadow of Nazism, represented by the grandfather’s support of Hitler, continues to haunt both mother and son. Their attempt to confront or escape this legacy reflects a broader struggle faced by nations that cannot fully move on from their darkest chapters.
- Wealth and Moral Corruption: Wealth plays a central role in the story. The mother and son try to give away their fortune during the road trip, yet the money remains stubbornly present, almost like a curse. Instead of bringing peace, the fortune serves as a reminder of guilt, corruption, and greed. It becomes clear that money earned through destructive means can never lead to true freedom. The failure to get rid of it highlights how wealth and morality are always entangled, and how privilege can deepen the weight of shame.
- Mother–Son Relationship: The novel explores the complicated relationship between mother and son. Their bond is full of tenderness, but also bitterness and blame. The son tries to care for his mother, taking her out of the mental hospital and traveling with her, yet their conversations reveal deep wounds and unresolved pain. Love is present, but so are resentment and regret. Their relationship mirrors the larger themes of guilt and decline, showing how family ties can both comfort and suffocate.
- Memory and Trauma: Memory plays a crucial role in Eurotrash. Both mother and son revisit the past, sometimes through stories, sometimes through fragments of memory that feel distorted or exaggerated. Trauma seeps into these memories, making it unclear what is real and what is imagined. The novel shows how trauma changes the way people remember and retell their stories, blurring the line between fact and fiction. This theme captures the difficulty of living with inherited pain that refuses to fade.
- Search for Truth and Reality: One of the most striking aspects of the book is its questioning of reality. The narrative often feels unstable what is fact, and what is fiction? The son narrates events, but the grotesque and surreal details make the reader question their accuracy. This uncertainty reflects the instability of memory and the human tendency to reshape reality through stories. By mixing autobiography with fantasy, the novel asks whether truth is ever possible when dealing with trauma and shame.
- Search for Identity: The narrator’s journey is also a search for identity. He struggles to define himself in relation to his family’s history, his mother’s decline, and the shadow of national guilt. The road trip is more than a physical journey; it is an internal quest to understand who he is and what kind of life he wants to live. Identity here is shown as fragile and unsettled, shaped by memory, guilt, and the struggle to break free from the past.
- Guilt and Redemption: Guilt runs throughout the novel personal, familial, and national. The characters carry shame for their actions and their history, yet they also attempt, in small ways, to redeem themselves. The act of trying to give away their fortune is symbolic of this search for redemption, though it feels hollow and incomplete. The novel suggests that redemption is not easy and may never be fully possible when the past is built on harm. Still, the attempt itself reflects the human need for some form of release.
- Absurdity of Life: Eurotrash often highlights the absurd and surreal aspects of existence. The mother and son’s journey are full of strange, unsettling, and sometimes comical moments. Scenes shift between tragedy and humour, showing how life can feel both grotesque and ridiculous at the same time. This absurdity reflects the way trauma distorts reality, but it also adds a layer of dark comedy that makes the novel unsettling and unique.
- Power of Storytelling: Finally, the novel celebrates and questions the power of storytelling. Both mother and son love stories, quoting their favourites and weaving new ones as they travel. The book itself blurs autobiography and fiction, suggesting that stories shape our understanding of history, family, and identity. Storytelling becomes a survival tool something that helps the characters process their pain, even if it cannot erase it. It also invites readers to reflect on how we use stories to make sense of the world.
- Dark humour and satire: Eurotrash thrives on black humour, turning moments of bodily mess, family shame, and national guilt into biting comedy. Scenes such as emptying a colostomy bag or imagining the grotesque fantasies of the grandfather are both absurd and deeply sad. Humour here cuts through denial and exposes truths that are otherwise unbearable.
- Body, decay, and the grotesque: The novel lingers on the physical body its decline, illness, and mess. From the mother’s colostomy bag to drunken stumbles, these details are not just shocking value. They underline the vulnerability of aging, the duty of care, and how family love is often mixed with disgust and tenderness.
- Addiction and mental health: Alcohol, prescription drugs, and stints in psychiatric wards are woven into the story of the mother. Eurotrash portrays these struggles plainly, showing how addiction and illness warp family roles, making the son both caretaker and resentful witness.
- Autofiction and self-satire: Kracht toys with his own identity, making the protagonist share his name and profession. He mocks literary fame, self-importance, and the idea of the “writer’s voice.” This self-satire makes the book both personal and slippery, keeping the reader unsure where confession ends and invention begins.
- Intertextuality and cultural critique: Kracht loads Eurotrash with nods to Shakespeare, Flaubert, and Guy Debord, blending high culture with satire. These references highlight the emptiness of intellectual posturing when used to mask guilt or inflate egos. At the same time, they sharpen the novel’s critique of nationalism, privilege, and historical amnesia by placing them in dialogue with wider cultural traditions.
Notable Quotes from Eurotrash
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- “For only they, this old man, my grandfather, had thought, could adequately represent the Nordic ideal. The Norwegians, the Germans, the Danes were too weak — no, it had to be Icelanders, girls whom he would invite to his home as au pairs, to Sylt, girls in whose blood the sacred Edda sang eternally.”
This shocking passage shows how Nazi ideas of race still haunted Kracht’s family history. By linking his grandfather’s fantasies to twisted racial myths, Kracht uses satire to expose how dangerous and absurd these beliefs were. Eurotrash by Christian Kracht often mixes dark humour with painful truths, and this quote is a clear example.
- “It was always language itself, the liberation and simultaneous domination of the spastic glottis, that singular enigma which lay in the proper sequence of syllables. And it was always, then, the German. It had always been the German language. It had always been the scorched earth, the sufferings of ill-treated earth itself, war and the burning old city and the vegetable fields made infertile outside it. It had always been the ghetto purged with the flamethrower. It had always been the tailored, pale gray uniforms, the attractive blond officers with their ice-cube-filled gullets, whispering, smiling.”
This powerful line connects the German language to the horrors of history. Kracht suggests that words themselves carry the weight of war, violence, and memory. The language is not neutral but marked by the past. In Eurotrash, this theme shows how history cannot be separated from culture, even in something as ordinary as speech.
- “The complete failure of the denazification process.”
This simple but heavy statement reflects one of the central ideas of the novel — that Germany never fully confronted its Nazi past. Kracht criticizes how people ignored or softened the truth instead of facing it honestly. Eurotrash by Christian Kracht is both funny and tragic in how it deals with inherited guilt and silence.
- “It was always, then, the German.”
This short line, repeated in the longer passage above, highlights Kracht’s obsession with German identity and history. By repeating the phrase, he shows how impossible it is to escape the weight of being German, no matter how much one tries to distance from it.
- “With amusing nods to Shakespeare and Flaubert classics, not to mention the sociological theories of Guy Debord…”
Although part of the narrative voice, this line captures Kracht’s playful style. He mixes high culture with satire, showing both admiration and mockery. It reminds the reader that Eurotrash is not just a road trip story but also a sharp cultural critique.
- “A bored cab driver distracted by his own snotty nose.”
This small, funny image sets the tone of Eurotrash. Kracht often uses crude, awkward, or bodily details to show how absurd and uncomfortable life can be. Even in ordinary moments, he exposes the ridiculous side of human behaviour.
- “My mother recalling a romantic rendezvous from her youth in graphic detail, much to her son’s discomfiture.”
Here, Kracht shows the mix of humour and discomfort in his relationship with his mother. This moment is funny but also awkward, highlighting how the past both personal and historical always intrudes into the present.
- “After a fierce argument between the protagonist and his mother, the former still has to empty out her colostomy bag because of course he does.”
This is one of the most striking lines in Eurotrash. It combines dark humour, tenderness, and disgust in one scene. It shows how family duty and love persist even through conflict, bitterness, and uncomfortable realities.
- “The duo starts to give away the family’s ill-gotten wealth during their road trip, just handing out cash from a plastic bag in the car.”
This line captures the rebellious and absurd spirit of the book. By literally giving away stolen family money, Christian and his mother act out both guilt and freedom. In Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, generosity becomes both a joke and a way of cleansing family shame.
- “The novel is devastating — and devastatingly funny — when it’s absolutely tearing down legacies and reputations, bursting the balloon-egos of the Kracht family.”
This quote sums up the book’s mood. It is a mix of pain and laughter, where family pride is exposed as hollow. Kracht uses humour as a weapon against hypocrisy and denial.
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Best Reviews of Christian Kracht
- “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.”– Daniel Kehlmann
- “Imperium is astonishing and captivating, a tongue-in-cheek Conradian literary adventure for our time.”– Karl Ove Knausgaard
- “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.”– Sjón
- “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 still such a thing.”– Elfriede Jelinek
- “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.”– Joshua Cohen
- “Hilarious, unsettling and unexpectedly moving.” — Financial Times, Best Translated Book of 2024
Why You Should Read Eurotrash
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Eurotrash by Christian Kracht is not just a road trip novel but a fearless exploration of family secrets, memory, and history. It blends black humour with painful truths, showing how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt the present. What makes the book even more powerful is its deep reflection on language, translation, and expression. Christian obsesses over German as both a burden and a weapon, a medium that carries the scars of history. The translation by Daniel Bowles preserves this tension beautifully, turning the novel into a meditation on how words can liberate but also dominate. The book suggests that the wounds of history live inside language itself.
This mix of satire, family drama, and historical reckoning makes Eurotrash a unique reading experience. It is for readers who enjoy sharp wit, dark comedy, and thought-provoking insights into nationalism, memory, and identity. With its sharp sentences, unforgettable characters, and fearless engagement with uncomfortable truths, this novel shows why Christian Kracht is considered one of the most important German-language writers today.
Final Thoughts
Eurotrash is more than just a road novel; it is a sharp, emotional, and often unsettling exploration of memory, family, and the unhealed wounds of history. Christian Kracht combines dark humour with deep reflection, offering readers a story that is at once disturbing and moving. The seamless translation by Daniel Bowles ensures that the English edition preserves the novel’s unique voice and intensity. With its mix of satire, confession, and emotional truth, Eurotrash stands out as one of the most powerful contemporary novels and a worthy contender for international recognition. It is a book that lingers in the mind long after the last page, making it a must-read for anyone who values bold, thought-provoking literature.
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