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Fun, for the most part, but really uneven and underdone, reminding me of Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park. At one point the narrator acknowledges that the whole thing is sort of lifted from American Psycho, the father in the gray double-breasted buttoned-up suit with something wrong with his eyes and the mother in the nursing home with the black Ray-Bans. But, structurally, it seems more like Lunar Park, in that it starts with dense yet flowing haute-crust nepo-baby atrocity-patrimonial probably-quasi-autofictional exposition that gives way to a succession of little scenes with Mom, intending, You Shall Know Our Velocity-ishly, to give away tons of money, all of which is at most kind of humorous (when almost robbed, the trout at the restaurant where the trout was good 45 years ago) but ultimately heft-less, despite intermittent mention of grandparents in the SS etc.

The primary impression is that after maybe forty rich and evocative pages it feels rushed and is already working toward its end. It's "relenting" or "relentful," exactly unlike an uncompromising Bernhard novel (Extinction is mentioned in the blurbs). An attractive perspective, often surprising asides and flourishes like the bit about Bowie's teeth, stray paragraphs of top-notch Euro prose in translation, but in the end it didn't feel like it cared to continue, like it sort of dissolved in diffuse travel and finally the African savannah.

Seems like it could be so much better than it is, maybe if the initial few dozen pages were integrated throughout the dialogue-y dramatized travel bits with Mom? The mother-son dynamic has its touching funny poignant moments, the son of the successful well-dressed father dynamic has its moments too, and it's always fun to glimpse the lifestyles of super-rich Swiss, but overall it seems like this one needs another year or two in the oven.

At one point mentions Christoph Ransmayr as a peer of Sebald and Knausgaard and so I added some Christoph Ransmayr, who I've never heard of, to the queue. And I'll definitely read more Kracht, especially if Faserland makes its way to English, or if I learn German, or if I try to read it one day in French?