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Author Kracht 2008: As if caught in surreal events
Photo:
Julian Baumann
Every story needs its impetus;
an object, a person, an event that gets things going.
In Christian Kracht's new novel »Eurotrash«, it's a dark brown sweater.
One evening, while the first-person narrator of the book is out and about in downtown Zurich, he notices a small stand near Paradeplatz.
Paradeplatz is the center of the Swiss banking world, the center of money and prosperity.
There are a few figures standing there that evening who don't really want to fit: two "bespectacled women of indefinite age and a bearded, friendly young man."
They sell hand-knitted items.
The narrator takes a sweater with him, and when he later takes a look at the leaflet in the paper bag in the hotel, his thoughts start to rattle - the municipality is based where he was born and spent his childhood: in the Bernese Oberland .
He thinks about his family.
To his father, the rich publishing manager.
His mother, who, long since divorced from his father, is vegetating to herself on the so-called Gold Coast, the villa district on Lake Zurich, sedated with drugs, cheap white wine and vodka.
He thinks of his grandfather, of his role in National Socialism.
And finally, the sexual abuse his mother experienced as a child.
And later as a student, too.
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