This bonkers road-trip story is witty and annoying. I loved it

Her son catalogues all her faults and her slide into paranoia and dementia, but he also suggests she might have been able to “maintain decency in her delirium”. That she has not killed herself is a marvel in itself, living as she does in the country renowned for assisting death.

Switzerland itself is presented as grand, eternal, impenetrable. The Swiss people, in contrast, as small-minded and mean-spirited; people who have replaced the concept of soul with empiricism of money. Kracht – the novelist, not the protagonist – suggests that Switzerland is simply the small country that reflects the European mass. Who wouldn’t live on a Swiss lake if they had the dosh? The mother and son travel the country, starting in Zurich, where the language is German, going all the way across to Geneva where the language is French. Christian, intimate with both, hates them furiously and democratically.

I loved this book, although it took me a decade to read because I stopped every page to look up all the references. There are 190 pages, all layered, most arcane, some witty, some annoying, or boring but I am not the same reader who picked it up frowning over that first line: Anyway, so I had to go to Zurich again for a few days. What? Are we in a telephone conversation?

Buckle up, you’re in for a wild ride wasn’t mentioned either. It should have been. There’s increasing space for a cheap cliché these days.