Eurotrash by Christian Kracht review – blackly comic autofiction | Fiction in translation

Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist who writes in German. He has been publishing since 1995, when his debut Faserland won him favourable comparisons to Bret Easton Ellis and Nick Hornby. Despite Kracht’s high profile among German-language readers, Eurotrash is only the third of his novels to be translated into English. The first was 2012’s Imperium, inspired by the life of the historical figure August Engelhardt, an eccentric who founded a utopian cult in the South Seas based on sun worship and eating coconuts.

Eurotrash works a smaller, more personal canvas. It tells the story of a middle aged Swiss-German writer called Christian who wrote a novel called Faserland in the 1990s and now finds himself in Zurich, visiting his elderly mother. The apparently autofictional form might seem tricksy, if the revelations that follow weren’t so heartfelt. Christian’s mother is in her 80s, frail, mentally ill and medicating herself with a mixture of alcohol and prescription drugs.

The plot is set in motion by Christian’s wish to take her on a road trip from Zurich, south towards Lake Geneva and through the Swiss Alps to revisit familiar landscapes from his earlier life. He’s hoping to make a cathartic break with his family’s past. Since that past involves childhood sexual abuse, unrepentant Nazi ancestors, sadomasochism and a vast tainted fortune from the armaments industry, it’s a surprise to report that the resulting novel is not only moving and uplifting, but strangely funny.

Christian and his mother hit the road with a half-baked plan to give away their ill-gotten millions. Their journey takes them through a number of blackly comic set pieces at a vegetarian commune, a private airstrip and inside a broken-down ski lift. The pair of them argue, tell stories, reminisce, make up and fall out again. Their fractiousness can be briefly overcome in the face of a common enemy, but only for a short while. And even when their relationship is at its spikiest, Christian has to tend to his mother’s colostomy bag.

As the journey proceeds, the novel becomes less naturalistic and more self-reflexive. At one point, the cab driver suggests he might write a book about them. The pair swiftly unite to shut the idea down. Christian’s mother acquires the uncanny ability to foresee the future and to comment on the unfolding novel and her function in it. “Go and read Flaubert,” she tells her son. “You’d see how it’s done. Learn from the masters.”

Eurotrash is a knowing book, with excursions into German history and allusions to Shakespeare, myth and pop culture. Part of its charm is the voice of its narrator, a self-aware snob-insider who is anatomising the avarice and insecurity of the privileged class he was born into.

Christian’s late father made his fortune working for the real-life newspaper magnate Axel Springer, a man of immense wealth, rightwing political sympathies and huge cultural influence who is often compared to Rupert Murdoch. Christian tells us early on that his “childhood and youth were permeated by arrogance and hyperbole and fraud and degradation, by dead money”. At one point he describes the funeral dinner that was held in memory of his father. The guests sit in an awkward silence “disturbed only by the bevy of liveried waiters who announced and described the gimmicky roundelay of courses in advance. It was abysmally, depressingly bourgeois, these loudly and proudly proclaimed lobster tails on pea essence, these Chateaubriands, these basil sorbets.”

The scene resembles something from the TV show Succession, spikily contemptuous of the opulence it depicts and narrated by a more literate and self-aware version of Kendall Roy. The translator Daniel Bowles does a great job here and throughout, rendering the prose into a vivid English that feels both idiomatic and inventive – “bevy of liveried waiters” is lovely, and I’d be patting myself on the back for “gimmicky roundelay”.

What stops the book from being just smart-alecky is the profound tenderness and insight it brings to bear on the mother-son relationship at its heart. Christian and his mother love one another, yet their love contains a vast amount of pain, dislike and resentment. The barbed banter between them feels fresh and vital. There are moments of exquisite sadness when Christian struggles with the poignancy of his mother’s ageing and recalls the humiliations visited on her by her unfaithful husband. Yet he still doesn’t quite want to face the memories she shares of her own sexual adventures, protesting: “I should be allowed as, as … uh, as an aesthete to not have to deal with my mother’s libido.”

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.

• Eurotrash by Christian Kracht is translated by Daniel Bowles and published by Serpent’s Tail (£12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.