Christian Kracht – what kind of world is that?

One becomes aware when the publisher Christian Krachten new book “Air” praises as a “novel from the spirit of a radical romance”. Is an author who not only admires by many because of his style, but also eyed by many because of his fabrics. Cracking interest in fascist designs and theories, the caustic mockery against Altertund sixties in his early books, the description of communist rule as a dystopia in the novels “I will be here in the sunshine and in the shade” and “1979” – all of this has aroused the suspicion for some, crash could be a right.

On the occasion of his novel “Imperium”, journalist Georg Diez 2012 raised the accusation that Kracht was a “bouncer of the right thoughts” – but so clumsy that the literary public defended the attacked author almost closed. Conversely, the new right -wing publicist Götz Kubitschek tried long to take his own cause as a literary guarantor. But when the crash with “Eurotrash” published a novel in 2021, in which the deformation of German society through National Socialism plays a role, Kubitschek publicly said about the supposed “crybaby”.

Is Kracht still reveals in the new novel »Air« as an enemy of civilization? At first glance, there is a lot to say about it. We encounter the interior designer Paul, who lives from setting up the houses of people who have too much money. Paul’s professional success began by accidentally finding the right red to paint a salon for the Duke of Cumberland. Paul is considered a “magician” who can produce beauty, his life seems to be a “continuous state of success and recognition and happiness”. But sometimes Paul also feels like a “high -stapler” and mere “painter”. He lives in Stromness on the main island of the Scottish Orkney archipelago, where he appreciates the gray, repellent nature and seclusion. But actually electricity is not yet boring enough for him – he dreams of the completely deserted and overgrown property Barnhill House on the island of Jura, which he only knows from pictures. The I Instagram presence is disgusting, although he is caught in it himself.

Paul flies to Stavanger, where a strange mission awaits him: he should find the perfect white to delete a hall on behalf of a architecture agency he admired. His client Cohen turns out to be a mentally conjunction with her encounter. For Cohen, the magazine only seems pretext to indulge in metaphysical speculation. He is unable to life and tired of life. When Paul comes to the building, which is to be painted, he finds a gigantic data center in a cave, which seems to contain the “stored memories of the planet”. A solar storm leads to a power failure. When the lights tackled again, Paul disappeared. Meanwhile, Cohen comes to the conclusion: “It is best to kill yourself.”

In parallel to the enigmatic act in the present, a second narrative strand of the novel leads to a medieval -looking world in which the sun rises in the west. A nine -year -old girl named ILDR, abandoned by the parents, accidentally hits a stranger with her arrow. She maintains him healthy. As a thank you, the stranger shares unheard of knowledge and strange devices with her, so that he looks like a magician or a traveler from the future. Soon you suspect that it is Paul who has reached the parallel world in an unknown way. In front of the soldiers of a cruel duke of TVIot, Paul and Ildr on the Livagar river flee south in the hope of reaching a saving “Arctic Sea”.

The longer you read, the more you think you think yourself in a fantasy novel full of bloody colportage and strangely shallow language. But the adventurous surface is repeatedly irritated by anachronism: What does a metal screw have to look for in the medieval world? Why does the girl speak the stranger a sentence like “It is complicated”, which is known from the social media of the present? What kind of world is that, through which Paul, Ildr and in the end also be wrong? A fictional past? An apocalyptic future? A dream? A virtual universe in which the spirits of the dead protagonists haunted in digital form? Of course, the novel does not answer this question and this proves to be a typical work by Christian Kracht.

It is also typical that in “Air” once more protagonists get to a place that also carries utopian and dystopian features. It is the “Steinstadt” at the mouth of the river into the Arctic Ocean, where people have been living for many generations whose ancestors from the fertile north had fled the duke’s violence into the completely barren south. Although the world only consists of “water and stone”, the residents have not only furnished themselves, but are even happy. As usual in historical utopias since Thomas Morus, there is “practically no property”. In addition, the Steinstadt operates sustainably. There is equality between people, not even the fight against the duke’s troops changes something: »Everyone knew exactly what they had to do. There were no leaders who called the orders. “But all of this is only possible through social pressure:” Those who wanted to sleep alone were considered a self -supported nerd and was gently, but emphatically convinced that the power of the stone city was only in the community. “Paul and ILDR find their longings in this idyll, but the contact with the strangers themselves arouses the abroad themselves. Longing for a return to the lush world of the past.

Is this novel a product of radical romance? There is no shortage of romantic motives: the targetless journey of the protagonists and their fight against shaping evil are reminiscent of the novels by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, a forgotten forgot to forgotten the fantasy literature. The boundary between reality and dream blurred as with Novalis, lively figures have doppelgangers on paintings such as ETA Hoffmann. However, the artificiality and ambiguity exhibited makes it impossible to interpret Krachten novel as an unbroken praise of fleeing from civilization. As always, there is the universal irony at Kracht, and you also have an inheritance from times of early romance. The author proves to be a second -order romantic: The ideological ideas of romance are not reproduced, but their aesthetic processes. They have not yet lost their provocative power today. An escape from the present, the enigmatic end of the novel could indicate, is only possible at the expense of life.

Christian Kracht: Air. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 224 pages, born, 25 €.