"Christian Kracht ist ein ganz schlauer Bursche". Eurotrash und der Paratext zwischen Irritation und Metafiktion

Christian Kracht’s paratexts constantly oscillate between originality and smart market strategies. While his epitexts mostly have an irritating effect, his peritexts often complete the semantic dimension of his texts and become understandable only in connection to them. His new novel Eurotrash puts the reader in front of a particularly complex paratext: How should the title be understood? What is the meaning of the cover image, of the dedication and the epigraphs? The back cover contains a truly clever, half-true quotation of Handke’s (a brilliant PR strategy) and a brief text of Kehlmann’s, whose name often recurs in the novel and represents a bridge between the text and his paratext. Not least, a brief note in the imprint claims the fictionality of the whole story. Not only does it have the function to protect the author against possible plaintiffs, but it also amplifies the strong (meta)fictional ambivalence of the novel and the unreliability of the narrator.