Kraft

September 1, 2020
After entering an essay contest with a $1 million prize, one man wrestles with memories of women, boats, and David Hasselhoff. In his first book, Barbarian Spring (2015), the Swiss writer satirized capitalism and conspicuous consumption. Here he takes wry shots at academia, technology, and venture capitalists via a self-centered German professor with money woes and unsettling memories. Richard Kraft's current marriage is collapsing and his finances are in tatters from a previous one. He travels to California, where judges will choose the winner of the essay competition, which requires the writer to defend Alexander Pope's proposition "Whatever is, is right" in relation to technology. After a week, though, Kraft has produced nothing. Mostly his mind wanders. He recalls Ruth, a lover who rarely appears without a reference to the size of her breasts and/or hips, and Johanna, another, who ended their four-year affair inexplicably and left for San Francisco. He remembers watching the 1980s TV series Knight Rider, starring Hasselhoff and a talking car, and climbing the Berlin Wall, where he is reunited with Ruth and a son he was unaware of as Hasselhoff sings about "looking for freedom" from a crane basket. Elsewhere in essay-avoidance, Kraft goes rowing in the San Francisco Bay and loses his bearings, his boat, and his clothes before getting rescued and charged $8,000 for the lost boat and oars. He goes searching for Johanna and learns why she left him. And he has high-end macaroni and cheese with the contest's wealthy sponsor, who is also backing a floating-island project that would fit right in on Swift's Laputa. As with Robert Menasse's in The Capital, L�scher's satire requires some knowledge of recent European history and politics. It's also diffuse, but Kraft's seriocomic fumblings and failings help to hold it together. An uneven but often entertaining book.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 7, 2020
Swiss-German writer Lüscher (Barbarian Spring) delivers an arch, fascinating satire of world-weary European skepticism and irrational American hopefulness. Richard Kraft, a cash-strapped German professor of rhetoric, heeds a call from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to give a presentation in response to a prompt adapted from an Alexander Pope dictum (“Why whatever is, is right and why we can still improve it”), hoping to win the $1 million prize for the best response. Kraft travels to Palo Alto, Calif., for the competition and stays with his old friend Istvan, who was a Hungarian dissident in the 1980s and shares Kraft’s love of free markets and the television show Knightrider. Once in California, Kraft suffers from writer’s block (“Has the California sun, beating down on your head day in, day out, dried up your brain?”) and is bemused by Silicon Valley culture. In one memorable scene that perfectly captures his unmoored status, he almost drowns in San Francisco Bay’s Corkscrew Slough. The narrative periodically leaves Kraft’s floundering to chronicle the intellectual, political, and romantic entanglements that shaped Kraft into the melancholy, reticent, and odd scholar he’s become. A Nabokovian, Pnin-like figure at once ridiculous and noble, Kraft is a “seer” who “perceive the nature of things in their irreducible complexity,” which leaves him marvelously ill-suited to the fallacious boosterism required to write the winning presentation. His attempt, though futile, furnishes the gloomy humor and dense but never arid ruminations. This is a wonderfully strange novel, and one not to be missed.