Chapter 9 - Christian Kracht???s Faserland (Frayed-Land)

Summary

Since its publication in the early summer of 1995 Faserland (Frayed-Land) has divided critical opinion. Increasingly hailed as a masterpiece in some quarters, it is still condemned as aesthetically worthless in others. One reason for this is the contested status of German ‘pop’ literature itself, with which Faserland and its author are associated as no other recent single work or individual writer is. Other reasons lie deeper and can be located in the novel itself. Both its form, an unreflective picaresque confession, and its content, a series of degenerate parties attended by the pampered jeunesse dorée, are said to be either strikingly new or hopelessly banal. For some, the novel, which ends with the narrator communing with the spirits of Goethe and Thomas Mann, is embedded in German literary tradition (though, as we shall see, that tradition has a specifically Swiss inflection). For others, it is a cheap imitation of an already boorish American genre. Novels by Bret Easton Ellis – in particular Less than Zero (1985), which is set among bored wealthy teenagers in Los Angeles – are repeatedly cited as Kracht’s models. Yet any reader who comes to Kracht from Ellis will be struck by his moralism, which is distinctly lacking in the Californian original. Kracht is either a right-wing irredentist and a scourge of the sensibilities of ageing ’68ers or a despairing humanist in search of lost values. He either penetrates the dull Zeitgeist of egotistical consumerism, mourning its spiritual emptiness, or he skims joyfully on its surface, celebrating superficiality through his characters’ encyclopaedic recall of brand names and designer labels, and deeply held opinions on trivia. In the critical literature, which in its bulk already far exceeds the novel’s 150 pages, there is little consensus. Here, however, conflicting interpretations are mutually enriching. In this chapter, I set out what I see as the principal positions in the arguments over Faserland and contend that one sign of its enduring significance lies in the lack of critical agreement. I then conclude with some comments about its political stance.