Christian Kracht against minimalism

Air, Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles, Serpent’s Tail, £12.99

The Swiss writer Christian Kracht is contemporary fiction’s great thrasher of expectations. No novel of his ever resembles its predecessor, and none of them go where you’d expect them to. His 2001 work 1979 opens in Tehran on the eve of the Iranian Revolution, but concludes in a Chinese re-education camp. In Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (2008), Lenin doesn’t return to Russia but creates a Soviet Republic in Switzerland instead. Imperium (2012), while it follows the real-life fruitarian and nudist August Engelhardt to the South Pacific, is mockingly written in the ponderous prose of a lesser Thomas Mann. For all the promise of its title, Eurotrash (2024) is not set in Ayia Napa or Lloret del Mar but in the back of a hired taxi in Switzerland.

Kracht’s talent for bringing off his outlandish fictions gives him the impish air of a court jester. But even someone long accustomed to the Swiss writer’s shenanigans can only be so prepared for the peculiar melancholy strangeness of his latest novel, Air. For while it’s a brisk read, at just under 200 pages, as Kracht’s novels usually are, it is by some distance his most bizarre and befuddling work to date.

At its centre is the thirtysomething Paul, who lives by himself on the Scottish islands of Orkney, where he makes a living furnishing homes before they are put up for sale or rent. With an eye for detail, he lays out Turkish kilims or white sheep’s wool rugs, arranges orange rhododendron clippings in clay jugs, paints the walls a celadon green, spreads out orange Penguin paperbacks and uses old incandescent bulbs for lighting. In short, he fills the vacant properties with ‘beauty and substance and meaning’, thereby absolving future buyers or renters of the burden of having to use their imagination.

Ironically, of course, buyers repeatedly want their living spaces decorated the way Paul stages them for the viewings, finding his arrangements ‘substantially more beautiful’ than their own prospective ideas. ‘The simulation, the suggested life on display, was more real to them,’ the narrator observes with a wink and a nudge:

The secret to Paul’s successful temporary stagings was that he could reveal to people their own glorious future, a future already contained within the property in question, which would sparkle into existence and yet then vanish once more – as though he were able to show people the set of a play without actors, one with only a brief run but a smashing success nonetheless, and as a result they’d wish their lives to be that way ever after, without messy stacks of unopened bills in the corner, without empty milk cartons, without toilet-paper-roll holders, energy-saving lightbulbs, and laundry baskets full of worn underwear and orphaned socks. In the eyes of his clients – although neither he nor they ever managed to put it this way – Paul was a magician, who helped them outfox the entropic, horribly depressing circumstances of their lives.

At the novel’s outset, Paul has received a commission from a magazine called Kūki (the Japanese word for air) to find ‘the perfect white’ to paint a large dark hangar. He is flown first class to Stavanger in Norway, where at the magazine’s surprisingly dingy office he meets a man named Cohen, who looks ‘exactly like an adult version of the boy’ from Spielberg’s film Artificial Intelligence. A chain-smoking bundle of nerves, Cohen launches into a bizarre monologue about Slavic neopaganism, Arthurian legends, and The Golden Bough. To Paul’s dismay, he dismisses Kūki as an insignificant side project, mocks the cultural obsession with the north, and explains that memories have a molecular basis and are stored ‘on an atomic level’. He then tells Paul that his assignment is to paint the Green Mountain Data Center outside Stavanger – ‘one of the central repositories of human memory’ – completely white.

Even this half-summary risks making Air sound more straightforward than it really is. Actually, each chapter alternates between Paul’s story and a seemingly unconnected fantasy narrative set in a distant past of Arthurian legend or Norse mythology. There we encounter a young girl, Ildr, hunting for deer in a forest with a bow and arrow. Still only a child, she takes pleasure in standing still with her bow raised while the morning mist envelops her shoeless feet. We’re told that her poverty doesn’t bother her because ‘she knew nothing else’, and that she imagines ‘the distant Frozen Sea’ to be like the sound of blood rushing in her ears, ‘a low never-ending greyish yellow hum’.

Ildr shoots what she assumes is a deer but is surprised to find a wounded man on the ground instead, her arrow piercing his chest just below his right shoulder. Strangely, the man is wearing a white tunic and an ‘odd round metal thing on his nose that held small rounds of glass and was attached to his ears’. Puzzled, the resourceful Ildr nevertheless manages to transport the stranger back to the hut where she lives alone, her mother having died of the Yellow Death and her father off somewhere, unlikely to return. While the stranger is recuperating, the girl successfully wards off a passing soldier ‘wearing the red and white colours of the Duke of Tviot’. The soldier is looking for the man she wounded.

Incredibly, we are still only 20-odd pages into Air, and while the exact point of collision between the novel’s two narrative tracks is yet to come, the reader already intuitively knows that the wounded man is Paul. (It is perhaps a testament to Kracht’s confidence as a writer that no alternative ever suggests itself.) Structurally, this stratagem allows the novel to unfold two mysteries at the same time: how did Paul get here, and where and when is ‘here’ exactly?

The more it begins to dominate the novel, the more gripping the fantasy narrative becomes. There are scenes of astonishing violence in which Paul and Ildr fight off the Duke’s soldiers with a ceramic handgun and bow and arrow, while the dialogue between adult and child is often emotionally stirring. Together, they escape the forest and walk for several days in the general direction of ‘the Frozen Sea’, where eventually they come across a friendly people living in the cliffs of a barren wasteland of ice and stone. The Duke himself, however, is chasing them, and suddenly Cohen is there, too, armed with a rifle with a leather strap.

I’ll leave the plot summarising there. Suffice it to say that, whether this is all some strange dream, or a rupture in the time-space continuum, or the author’s private joke, Air is first and foremost an audacious imaginative achievement. One marvels at the thoroughness of design concealed beneath Kracht’s laconic yet lyrical prose; page for page, it gives the impression of being written in a state of creative exultation, of sheer mad literary joy.

Still, Kracht’s Kulturkritik is clear enough beneath all the fantasy, Air repeatedly poking fun at our cultural obsession with Nordic and Japanese minimalism. The critic Becca Rothfeld, in All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess (2024), has described the ethos of Marie Kondo and her de-cluttering method, in which any evidence of habitation in a home is as good as eliminated: ‘The ultimate goal is to inhabit even permanent dwellings not only as if we were about to leave but also as if we have just left.’

Paul lives very much as professional de-clutterers counsel. Though Swiss, he has moved to an island north of Scotland, where he is surrounded on all sides by the clean slate of the sea: ‘cold and stony and clean’. He is gratified to be regarded as a stranger on Orkney, at one point reflecting that on Fair Isle, a little further north, you had to be an islander for five generations to count as anything other than an interloper. ‘And this is how it really should be in this disgraceful world, with its lack of boundaries, Instagram, and the horrors of vernacular architecture,’ he thinks.

At the airport in Norway, Paul is annoyed by the crowds and thinks longingly of a different island, Jura, ‘Scotland’s most inaccessible island’, where there is a house with no electricity, no heating, and no phone reception. ‘It was the perfect house.’ Shortly after, when Paul is informed that he is to go to the Green Mountain Data Center to paint the whole complex white, Cohen tells him: ‘Hopes, ideas, and memories amassed in such large quantities in the Green Mountain Data Center that painting this space white would ensure order, and clarity, and that would require not just any white, but the perfect white, the singular white.’

At times, Air can be likened to recent fiction by Solvej Balle, Ben Lerner and Georgi Gospodinov, all of whose post-pandemic novels toy with the physical laws of time and space. When Paul wishes ‘he could vanish in time’, he reminds one of the protagonist of Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, who vanishes into an endless 18 November. Similarly, the mysterious character at the centre of Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, Gaustine, at one point observes that: ‘A person is not built to live in the prison of one body and one time,’ much like the narrator of Ben Lerner’s Transcription reflects that, since he began using a smart phone in 2008, ‘to be where I was was too much for me, or too little’.

But for the most part, Air is less a satire than a funhouse mirror in which one narrative reflects a dream-like distortion of the other. After all, the elements of the novel’s fantasy world are innocuously present in the novel’s first few pages, from the ‘cold and stony’ sea to the oil painting of Merlin and Lancelot by James Archer (you’ll see). In fact, so playfully has every detail in this novel been selected that I suspect Cohen is named for the American novelist Joshua Cohen, a friend of Kracht’s. Putting your literary buddy in your novel and joking that he looks like the adult version of the boy in a Spielberg movie? Now that would be echt Kracht.