Christian Kracht - Novels

Novels

The protagonists of Kracht’s fiction embark on journeys that take them in search of an elusive moment of immersive, utopian experience or spiritual enlightenment often located in a different nation or culture. Their journey usually, but not always, results in disappointment, failure or even death. The theme of travel was introduced in Kracht's debut novel Faserland (1995), a text that is often central in the discussion of German pop literature by literary critics and scholars. While the first wave of the novel’s criticism identified Faserland as a novel about the affirmation of brand names and consumer culture, a second wave of criticism suggested rather that the novels evinces the protagonist’s dissatisfaction with his lifestyle and existential ennui. Early criticism of the novel suggested the influence of Bret Easton Ellis on his work, with some commentators even accusing him of plagiarism. Since the critical revaluation of Faserland, however, critics have observed the potential influence of the novel on in work by younger German-language writers such as Leif Randt in his 2011 novel Schimmernder Dunst über Coby County (“The glistening haze over Coby County”).

The setting of Kracht’s second novel 1979 is Iran and begins in medias res against the backdrop of the revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini during the titular year. This novel also deals with alienation and a chiefly Western form of consumer existence, but it depicts the fragility of an apparently decadent Western-metropolitan value system and its powerlessness before the Eastern-totalitarian models of Islamism and Maoism. After the supposed frivolousness of Faserland, then, Kracht was now seen as on the way "towards genuine seriousness" in his writing – a view held by critics that was no doubt informed by the context of the September 11 attacks with which the novel’s publication coincided. Kracht is sceptical about such a reading of his work and argues that he has literary “light entertainment” and “comedies”. Thus, during a television appearance on the popular Harald Schmidt Show in 2001, Kracht argued that his book was essentially kitsch.

The 2008 novel Ich werde hier sein, im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (“I will be here, in sunshine and in shadow”) imagines an alternative history of the twentieth century in which Lenin never returned to Russia from Switzerland, but instead founded a Swiss Soviet Republic - a Communist state engaged in the colonisation of Africa and in perpetual war with other totalitarian empires, notably with a federation of British and German fascists. Channeling Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Ford Coppola’s 'Apocalypse Now, the plot of the novel traces a black Swiss political commissar's journey to the heart of the empire to arrest the rogue officer Brazhinsky in an Alpine tunnel complex called the Réduit.

Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten quickly garnered acclaim in the German-speaking literary world. Broadsheet Die Welt called it a "glorious horror story". The ] praised the writing as not only deeply reminiscent of Ernst Jünger, but also as the "most beautiful German prose currently on offer". But the Frankfurter Rundschau 's reviewer discounted Ich werde hier sein as "simply moronic" and Die Tageszeitung found the text to be too diffuse and incoherent, amounting to just a "drug-clouded scenery"