Literature Christian Kracht's novel "Air" takes us into the folds of time
Christian Kracht's "Air" has once again been nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize this year. The novel defies the laws of our reality as consistently as it does playfully.
13.03.2025, 06:31
SDA
Christian Kracht has recently been a regular guest on the shortlists for book prizes. In 2021, he was honored with both the German and the Swiss Book Prize. He then withdrew from the award in Switzerland. His unusual novels are well received by juries. This obviously also applies to his latest work entitled "Air".
The novel, as the short description promises, catapults a Swiss interior decorator, who lives in seclusion on the Orkney Islands, out of time and out of his world. There is something in the air that is difficult to grasp.
Two parallel narrative strands
"Air" is the story of Paul, who successfully gets through life with interior design commissions. His good reputation earns him a request from a design magazine. He is asked to paint a huge cavern in Stavanger, Norway, which houses a gigantic data center, a "perfect white".
The novel also tells the story of a stranger who is shot by a girl while hunting in a prehistoric setting and then nursed back to health. Christian Kracht runs the two narrative strands in parallel, alternating between the chapters, until he brings them together in the middle of the book, thus revealing his penchant for the real unthinkable, i.e. only the literary possible.
Two key words signal the caesura. At the moment when Paul is inspecting the Data Center, solar turbulence on Earth causes an electromagnetic storm and paralyzes the Data Center. After that, Paul disappears without a trace. And in the primeval forest, the stranger explains to his clever companion that the mysterious object in his pocket is a ceramic gun from the 3D printer.
Physics overturned
In "Air", the continuity of time, space and action suddenly disintegrates. The electromagnetic storm undermines physics. Paul lands as a stranger in an early time in which he has to flee from an evil tyrant and arrives in a strangely inhospitable region in which everything is stone. Here, by chance or not, he meets his employer Cohen again. He has climbed into his boat with somnambulistic determination and rowed across the Arctic Ocean to the Stone Kingdom.
"Air" folds up time, warps space and thus shifts its plot into the unreal - from the reader's perspective. Christian Kracht deconstructs what appears to be a sensible narrative according to all the rules of the art.
Since the novels "Faserland" (1995) and "1979" (2001), Kracht, born in 1966, has been labeled a writer of his generation and its crises of meaning. "Eurotrash" (2021) has reinforced this attribution. But the label falls short, even if Kracht carefully cultivates the mystery surrounding his person.
His novels repeatedly surprise with plots that are as confusing as they are convoluted. They stage strange stories with weird effects. The novel "Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten" (2008) transforms the Swiss Alps into a Leninist réduit. "Imperium" (2012) tells of the imperial delusions of a German guru in the South Seas. The narrative in "Air" now violates all human experience of the world. Is time a line and the world a space, or do they merely form planes?
Dream or realism
However, and this is the flip side, Kracht always tells us with beautiful vividness how the world appears to him, whether on the Orkney Islands, in the Tyrant's forest or in the stone kingdom of the Stone People. With a narrative poker face and smiling irony, he lends his stories a convincing realism.
As a result, his books are thoroughly enjoyable to read and leave you wondering what new oddities the author has in store. Because things are unusual, even dubious, Kracht allows his readers to take part in the unfolding of his stories and mentally build on them. Here, where all laws seem to be suspended, the literary imagination begins. Everyone has to find out for themselves when reading whether this is dreamlike staging or just exhaustingly constructed.
*This text by Beat Mazenauer, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
