Eurotrash/Perfection
Two recent novels in translation
Reminder: I have a review of the new Jean Echenoz novel, Command Performance, up at Necessary Fiction.
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht
Translated by David Bowles
Serpent’s Tail, 2024; 192 pages.
This one’s been hailed as darkly comic autofiction. The protagonist takes his mother out of her Zurich apartment for a romp around Switzerland before committing her to a home or rehab clinic or something, who cares. Their family is wealthy, and long part of the German elite: his grandfather was a Nazi who worked with the Ahnenerbe to help organize a race science expedition to Tibet, his father was Axel Springer’s right hand man, and more recently his mother made a killing investing in Rheinmetall, a German arms manufacturer. The family money is blood money, and when the mother withdraws six hundred thousand Swiss francs in cash (close to a million CDN) for their day trip, the narrator son hits upon the idea of getting rid of it.
For me, Eurotrash wasn’t as funny as people have been making it out to be. The narrator’s ongoing banter with his mother gives the impression that this is a longrunning act the two have, but it didn’t leave me wanting more. Two parts I enjoyed, though: the Swiss health resort chalet they visit and think about funding turns out to be run by Nazis just as bad as his family but even more crude, and he goes around telling people he’s Daniel Kehlmann, the German author of Tyll, a novel I happened to love. There are a bunch of other references to contemporary German literature but honestly, who cares? Not me.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Translated by Sophie Hughes
New York Review Books, 2025; 136 pages
“Gentrification, as they understood it, was something other people did. … If they spilled some coffee, their first instinct was to press Command-Z.”
A book without dialogue, without plot, and in the first chapter there aren’t even any characters, just a description of an apartment. But it’s a book with a story, and if you’re a fellow millennial, it’s your story, at least in part. Every review I’ve seen of Perfection brings up Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties, and for good reason: the author tells us his story is written in imitation of that book. Things is (I’m told) the story of people as told through the objects they own, and Perfection is much the same. Anna and Tom have fewer actual things to their name (Danish furniture, an infinity of houseplants, a subscription to Monocle), but their story is also told through their work (somewhat precarious but also sufficient), through the things they encounter online (news and trends from New York and California, the omission of all life events that are less than Instagram perfect), and in their adopted city of Berlin (a stream of art scene friends who come and go without forming any deep attachments, the escalation of the refugee crisis in 2015). It’s all a bit generic, never rising beyond a sketch, but that’s also the point.
I have no intention of reading Perec, and for me a better comparison is Murakami and Houellebecq, who both indulge in what I like to think of as catalogue writing: glossy descriptions of name brand consumer goods. When Houellebecq does it, he usually has some point to make about neoliberalism, whereas Murakami just seems to enjoy writing in that way for its own sake, and gets branded as a less serious writer. Latronico splits the difference. He seems to enjoy this kind of writing and there’s no grand ideological point he’s trying to make, but he’s able to create a haunting effect, leaving Anna and Tom and we the readers sensing there is something wrong with this way of life, that it’s all a little too aimless.
I also really enjoyed
’s interview with Latronico, available here. I’m hoping more of his work will soon become available in English.More books from Adam’s Notes (and elsewhere):
Permafrost by Eva Baltasar and The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zamba
Three Rooms by Jo Hamya, Professor Andersen’s Night by Dag Soldstad, and These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy
Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes and Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq
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