Bøger af Christian Kracht

Den schweiziske stjerneforfatter Chri­stian Kracht har skrevet en sofistikeret roman, hvori vi følger mor og søn på road trip gennem Schweiz og på sporet af familiens nazistiske og tabubelagte fortid.I Eurotrash tager romanens fortæller, forfat­teren Christian Kracht, sin mor med på road trip gennem Schweiz. Han ønsker at forstå de større sammenhænge i sin families forhold og at konfrontere dens nazistiske fortid. Med en plastikpose fuld af en formue i kontanter og kufferten pakket med morens kashmirsweatre, psykofarmaka og vodkaflasker, tager mor og søn af sted i taxa fra Zürich.Eurotrash er en tragikomisk, elegant og højst spektakulær fortælling om en familie og dens dæmoner, fortielser og benægtelser gennem historien. Romanen spidder spørgsmål om nedarvet skyld og skam og formår samtidig at tegne et rørende og sammensat portræt af en mor.”En modig roman … Enestående i Krachts forfatterskab og sågar i hele den tysksprogede litteratur.” – Der Spiegel”En fænomenal bog … Moren er den mest excentriske, skarpe, vidunderlige karakter.” – Frankfurter allgemeine zeitung”Christian Kracht har skrevet en fabelagtig dekonstruktionsroman, hvor lidelse og leg, autenticitet og spilfægteri, mystik og oplysning på vidunderlig vis griber ind i hinanden. Eurotrash er en begivenhed.” – Die Zeit

Ny roman af den schweiziske forfatter, journalist og manuskriptforfatter Christian Kracht. I 1933 er den amerikanske kulturimperialisme ved at få fat så langt hjemmefra som i den stolte kulturnation Japan. Stumfilmstjernen Charlie Chaplin er på promotion-tur i landet, mens den japanske embedsmand Masahiko Amakasu forbereder et kulturpolitisk modtræk. Amakasu vil lave en ”celluloid-akse” mellem den stolte filmnation Tyskland og sit eget hjemland. Der bliver sendt bud til Europa efter filminstruktøren Emil Nägeli, han skal lave en film i Japan for at modvirke amerikanernes kulturelle erobringstogt. Med sig har Nägeli sin forlovede Ida, en beslutning han senere skal komme til at fortryde. De døde er en brutal fortælling om kultursammenstødet mellem vestlig og japansk kultur. Christian Kracht er den tysksprogede litteraturs helt store stilist og provokatør i disse år; De døde er ingen undtagelse. Kracht registrerer i romanen med et kameras præcision de store kulturers destruktive kræfter.

Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, our unnamed middle-aged narrator embarks on a highly dubious road trip through Switzerland with his terminally ill and terminally drunken mother. They try unsuccessfully to give away or squander the fortune she has amassed from investing in armament industry shares. Along the journey they bicker endlessly over the past, throw handfuls of francs into a ravine and exasperate the living daylights out of their long-suffering taxi driver. The crimes of the twentieth century are never far behind, but neither is the need for more vodka.Eurotrash is a bitterly comic, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. Kracht's novel is a narrative tour-de-force of the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another.

From "the great German-language writer of his generation" (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Kracht's career narrated by an eponymous "Christian" (the first was his best-selling 1995 debut, Faserland). Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has arrived to care for his eighty-year-old mother after her discharge from a mental institution. Reckoning with his family's dark history-his long-dead grandfather was intimately associated with and unapologetically supportive of the Nazis-and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, Christian sets off on a road-trip with her. As they traverse Switzerland in a hired cab, mother and son attempt to give away her vast fortune, which they're carrying in a large plastic bag, to random strangers. By turns disturbing, disorienting, hilarious, and poignant, Eurotrash tells an intensely personal and unsparingly critical story of contemporary culture; a story that shows us a writer at the pinnacle of his powers of insight and observation.

"A great Faustian fable, and a literary endeavor of historical ingenuity that we now may start to characterize as Krachtian." -Karl Ove Knausgaard The follow-up to Christian Kracht's acclaimed novel Imperium (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year), The Dead mines the feverish early years of the Nazis' rise to power for a Gothic tale of global conspiracy, personal loss, and historical entanglements large and small. In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil Nägeli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler's Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware that Nägeli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective-to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come. Meanwhile, in Japan, the film minister Masahiko Amakasu intends to counter Hollywood's growing influence and usher in a new golden age of Japanese cinema by exploiting his Swiss visitor. The arrival of Nägeli's film-star fiancée and a strangely thuggish, pistol-packing Charlie Chaplin-as well as the first stirrings of the winds of war-soon complicates both Amakasu's and Nägeli's plans, forcing them to face their demons . . . and their doom."The Dead is the beautiful, brilliant, and utterly mad novel that Thomas Mann would have written had he known the East like Yukio Mishima and loved his adopted Hollywood with the gusto of Nathanael West." -Joshua Cohen"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

I bogen, Looking Writing Reading Looking, går 26 internationale forfattere i dialog med kunstværker fra Louisianas Samling. Forfatterne åbner vores øjne for værkerne med deres særlige, poetiske blik. Igennem en bred vifte af litterære genrer som digt, essay, erindringer og noter viser bogens bidrag, hvor forskelligt man kan opleve kunst. Forfatterne er her læsere af kunstværket – og herfra kan vi selv læse videre. I kunsten og i litteraturen. Bogens bidragsydere er Georgi Gospodinov, Colm Tóibín, Claudia Rankine, Richard Ford, Peter Laugesen, Chris Kraus, Sjón, Anne Carson, Roxane Gay, CAConrad, Mariana Enriquez, Hiromi Itō, Delphine de Vigan, Domenico Starnone, Yoko Tawada, Jacques Roubaud, Gunnhild Øyehaug, Eileen Myles, Tomas Espedal, Christian Kracht, Guadalupe Nettel, Anne Waldman, Matias Faldbakken, Chigozie Obioma, Péter Nádas og Tahar Ben Jelloun. I bogen omtales blandt andet værker af Francis Bacon, Asger Jorn, Henry Heerup, Alicja Kwade og mange andre.

In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. In his first novel, internationally bestselling author Christian Krachht uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt's life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness.

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