„Air“ by Christian Kracht: Neverending Stories

Another radical departure for the Swiss writer: With "Air", Christian Kracht not only turns his back on autofiction but also on reality itself.

Note: This review was first published in German. Find the original here.

With his last novel „Eurotrash“, Christian Kracht recently revisited his debut novel „Faserland“ – and with it the resurging trend of autofiction that the Swiss writer once helped popularize. Continuing down this path seemed unlikely, given that there was little left for him to explore within the genre. It is therefore no surprise that Kracht’s newest novel not only moves beyond autofiction but also departs from reality itself.

The same can be said about his protagonist Paul, a decorator and interior designer with a preference for Nordic austerity: gray colors, stone, glass, a few practical items, harmony with nature, though preferably from a distance. Years ago, Paul moved from Switzerland to the remote Orkney Islands, probably because of this same preference. He is a typical Kracht protagonist in many ways: a cosmopolitan without financial worries, obsessed with the surfaces of things, simultaneously tormented by loneliness and a longing for an elusive kind of authenticity. Paul is thrilled when Cohen, the editor of the design magazin Kūki, hires him for a job in Norway: the server halls of a data center – which, in a meta joke typical for Kracht, exists in real life – need a fresh coat of paint, and Paul is to find the perfect hue of white.

A Journey to Another World

Upon landing in Stavenger the first irritations begin to arise when Cohen dismisses the Kūki aesthetics as kitsch and reveals his obsession with Slavic neopaganism. Even worse: During Paul’s first visit to the hall a solar wind causes a power outage and Paul suddenly disappears – only to reappear in a parallel world somewhere between medieval Europe and, yes, Slavic neopaganism. Together with the orphaned girl Ildr, who accidentally shoots him during a hunt, he flees before the minions of a villainous duke toward the south, where they find a stone city by the coast of a stony desert…

Despite all the violence that Ildr and Paul encounter, one cannot help but notice that this strange world comes very close to one that Paul might have imagined in his dreams: a world permeated with the inorganic, cold, clean – and, as Kracht subtly implies throughout, fascistic – style Paul admires. It’s not a coincidence that the great hall of the stone city resembles a restaurant that Paul once furnished. The central difference is that here, it’s not a style, not even really a decision, but necessary and inherent to survival, making it immune to accusations of kitsch. “These people had worn the same clothes for three hundred years,” Paul notes about the residents of the stone city. “There were no changing fashions, the cuts didn’t evolve, they wore what had always existed.”

“- It’s so easy with your machine.
– How do you know this word – machine?
– You said it earlier.
– Did I?
– Yes, definitely.
– I guess.”

Upon closer examination, it is obvious that this way of life cannot make sense. Kracht, seemingly not satisfied with the supernatural premise, keeps piling additional irritations and confusing elements on top. What, for example, is the deal with the ceramic pistol Paul carried with him to the parallel world, which apparently only Ildr can use? At one point, Ildr refers to the pistol as a machine, and Paul asks her how she knows that term. She says she heard him use it earlier, which Paul doesn’t remember doing. Re-reading the text confirms: Paul really didn’t use the term. And Ildr? Isn’t it suspicious how this precocious girl manages to pick up abstract scientific concepts in an instant during her conversations with Paul?

Literally Flattened

It’s all just a little too good to be true. The sterile idyll begins to collapse when Cohen suddenly also appears. In the end, everything culminates in a picture on Paul’s wall, a painting of the wizard Merlin and the knight Lancelot: literally flattened. It’s certainly intriguing how Kracht plays with meta-levels and references. It’s also fascinating how far, thanks to his subject matter – whether intentionally or not – he veers into fantasy literature. The idea of a person from our world landing in another has been a classic narrative pattern in the genre since „Alice in Wonderland“ and the „Narnia“ books.

Of course, Kracht aims for more than mere entertainment, and his postmodern blending of worlds is so subtle that it opens up a whole array of interpretive spaces. Still, his approach is not unprecedented: In the film adaptation of „The Wizard of Oz“ (1939), all the mythical creatures Dorothy encounters have a counterpart in the real world of Kansas, and in Michael Ende’s „The Neverending Story“, the genre’s pinnacle to this day, it is the magical book of the same name that the protagonist Bastian first reads and then ends up in – only to wake up to the inevitability of confronting real life.

Following in Michael Ende’s Footsteps

Following in the footsteps of Ende, Kracht´s „Air“ ultimately targets the concept of escapism. Paul’s detachment from the world, his obsession with architecture and design, are merely less extreme examples of the literal flight from the world that eventually transports him to a parallel universe. Without even mentioning the great crises of our time, Kracht makes them visible by making his protagonists move to the edges of the continent, having them long for solitude and significance. The loud, crowded, complicated world is too much for Paul – he would rather live the simple, high-stakes, but ultimately two-dimensional life of a fantasy hero.

That being said, „Air“ contains more than just irony and cynicism: The relationship between Paul and Ildr may seem contrived and sentimental, but it has an emotional core. In fact, Kracht’s unadorned, precise language makes the surface plot work so well that one can easily imagine him eventually starting his own series of children’s books, akin to Cornelia Funke’s „Inkheart“. Just as „The Neverending Story“ makes the book within the book both the downfall and salvation of its hero, the fantastic journey in „Air“ takes on a twofold role. Granted, literature, especially fantasy literature, may primarily serve escapism – nevertheless it remains a necessity, at least if you’re named Christian Kracht or enjoy reading Christian Kracht. It is this ambiguity that this straightforward and simultaneously inexplicable novel captures so well.