Christian Kracht Against Minimalism

The Swiss writer Christian Kracht is contemporary fiction’s great thrasher of expectations. No novel of his ever resembles its predecessor, and none of them go where you’d expect them to. His 2001 work 1979 opens in Tehran on the eve of the Iranian Revolution, but concludes in a Chinese re-education camp. In Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (2008), Lenin doesn’t return to Russia but creates a Soviet Republic in Switzerland instead. Imperium (2012), while it follows the real-life fruitarian and nudist August Engelhardt to the South Pacific, is mockingly written in the ponderous prose of a lesser Thomas Mann. For all the promise of its title, Eurotrash (2024) is not set in Ayia Napa or Lloret del Mar but in the back of a hired taxi in Switzerland.