Christian Kracht 1979 Kiepenheuer & Witsch, September 2001. 240pp. ISBN 3-462-03024-8 1979 was a bad moment to arrive in Teheran, with tanks out in the streets and the Shah about to fall. And no moment is a good one to arrive at a Chinese gulag. Both these fates, however, befall the narrator of this book. A gauche, dim, somewhat melancholy body and fashion conscious gay, he is travelling with a companion his opposite in almost every respect, the clever, famous, globe-trotting writer Christopher, who is suffering from a gruesome skin disease and also killing himself with drink and drugs. At a party they attend in a modern Teheran mansion, all Napoleonic white and gold, he collapses and is taken to die in the surroundings of a squalid hospital. But not before Mavrocordato, a Romanian with a weird hair-do who claims to have second sight, has told the narrator that he is shortly due to be 'halved'. Mysteriously also he gives him the funds to travel to Mount Kailish, Tibet's holiest site, with the promise that if he walks round the base of the mountain all his sins will be washed away. Inspired by a group of pilgrims the narrator does indeed sense freedom, and recalls the last time he felt part of any community - which was at his kindergarten. But at this point the Chinese arrest him as a Russian spy, and we leave him in a gulag reading Mao's little book. No Berluti shoes here. At least, however, he has fulfilled Mavrocordato's prophecy: he has lost half his weight. Christian Kracht has been called the prime stylist of the pop - otherwise now nicknamed the VW Golf - generation. His cool style has led to comparisons with Evelyn Waugh, and here he adorns his tale not merely without pointing a moral but by deliberately assuming a cloak of feigned ignorance. He is content to leave the reader, through vividly described scenes, to observe the drift of a man bereft of intellectual resources towards an unprotesting acceptance of inhuman totalitarianism.