Mr. Kracht’s bizarre book willfully stymies understanding. The author spins a stylish kind of strangeness, however. The writing, in Daniel Bowles’s translation from the German, is glass-like and pristine, colored by the characters’ changing moods the way a window is touched by light and shadow. Most of all, the high-fantasy storyline, which culminates in an exciting battle between the duke’s army and an icebound civilization that shelters Ildr and Paul, is good fun. Readers will leave Air none the wiser, but surprisingly content in their confusion.
Kracht has a sharp satirical eye ... It’s hard to know where Kracht’s satire is really aimed, partly because he delivers his fantasy saga in a register of total sincerity ... This book is weird, messy, tonally incoherent — and yet eerily, unaccountably compelling. For all its nicks and pockmarks, I like it very much.
One of the joys of Air, down to the breathy purity of its title, is its contempt for design—an easy target, but one for which Kracht has sharpened his blade ... There’s more to the novel, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles, than a purse-lipped satire of fetishism, but Kracht keeps it well below the surface. It involves something mournful about consciousness and memory—an antimaterialist belief, maybe sincere, that we exist beyond time and space, that another dimension flickers like Thomson’s film projector ... I guess this is how I feel about Kracht: that he doesn’t want to be understood, and that this is somehow charming.
Air is as enigmatic as its title. The protagonists seek not so much salvation as a vanishing point, a way of disappearing into an alternative realm of meaning. Much remains unexplained, but clues and phrases recur ... Perhaps most importantly, the protagonist himself is brought alive ... Stylistically, too, the narrative moves from self-absorption to self- suppression, with the chapters set in the fantasy world incorporating significant amounts of dialogue and interaction. As the two strands intertwine and the survivors of the ice world return tentatively north, the painting of Merlin and Lancelot takes on new depths of meaning.
Air is not a capital-F fantasy novel but an exploration of the role of fantasy in modern life more generally ... This has long been a favourite subject of Kracht’s ... Read it again (it’s short) and Air is revealed to be a puzzle with a certain logic ... If the fans Kracht picked up with Eurotrash are willing to embark on a very different kind of journey with him, they will almost certainly discover something worthwhile in Air. They may just have to read it twice.
The reader experiences Christian Kracht’s new novel, Air, in a state of absorbed bewilderment: how on earth will these two narratives come together? ... Amid such spiritual malaise, there is a bracing, wishful escapism in the sublime visions of natural beauty that punctuate the fantasy narrative: immense ice sheets and rock formations, migrating birds, the aurora ... The narrative artifice is somewhat flimsy, and the exposition oddly perfunctory at times. Yet the novel’s rough-hewn quality befits its evocation of a fuzzy, porous reality. Air is perhaps best understood as a parable – a warning, as it were, from the present ... Kracht has taken a familiar premise – brooding creative types, bored of their own cleverness – and made it suggestively strange.
Throughout his career Kracht has been an arch-provocateur, and it’s hard to know how seriously to take much of this novel. The nebulousness of Air is likely to divide readers into those who find it playfully enigmatic and those who suspect that its apparent insubstantiality and multiple ambiguities conceal something best described by the title of another Perec novel: A Void.
Kracht’s elegant and surprising sentences are a pleasure to read but his prose, in Bowles’s pellucid translation, is deliberately sparer in Air than elsewhere ... You would not guess that writing Air was fraught, as it proceeds with seamless dream logic.
An engrossing work that is part science fiction, part parable ... Kracht has great fun with Air. There are sea battles, portentous comets, solemn exchanges and any number of tropes and archetypes employed in accounts of the present and past ... Yet in its predictions and preoccupations, it is a deadly serious work about the sheer precarity of existence ... The prose is translucent, in a mesmerising translation by Daniel Bowles, with the whole enterprise neatly underpinned by Kracht’s poignant emphasis on the very old-fashioned bonds of fealty and friendship
Kracht’s newest novel not only moves beyond autofiction but also departs from reality itself ... Aims for more than mere entertainment, and his postmodern blending of worlds is so subtle that it opens up a whole array of interpretive spaces ... Contains more than just irony and cynicism ... Granted, literature, especially fantasy literature, may primarily serve escapism – nevertheless it remains a necessity, at least if you’re named Christian Kracht or enjoy reading Christian Kracht. It is this ambiguity that this straightforward and simultaneously inexplicable novel captures so well.
