The Dead
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A great Faustian fable, and a literary endeavor of historical ingenuity that we now may start to characterize as Krachtian.” —Karl Ove Knausgaard
In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil Nägeli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware that Nägeli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective—to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the film minister Masahiko Amakasu intends to counter Hollywood’s growing influence and usher in a new golden age of Japanese cinema by exploiting his Swiss visitor. The arrival of Nägeli’s film-star fiancée and a strangely thuggish, pistol-packing Charlie Chaplin—as well as the first stirrings of the winds of war—soon complicates both Amakasu’s and Nägeli’s plans, forcing them to face their demons . . . and their doom.
"The Dead is the beautiful, brilliant, and utterly mad novel that Thomas Mann would have written had he known the East like Yukio Mishima and loved his adopted Hollywood with the gusto of Nathanael West." —Joshua Cohen
"The Dead is a story of love and sadness in times when the weak were broken by the unforgiving ideologies of fascism and National Socialism . . . I read The Dead twice in a row, first for the story and then for the beauty of the prose." —Sjón
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest from Kracht (Imperium) is an uneven novel about film in the years leading up to World War II. Japanese film minister Masahiko Amakasu, tired of Japan's lagging behind America on the film front, seeks to "establish a celluloid axis between Tokyo and Berlin." In Germany in the early '30s, when Nazism is on the rise, the production company Universum Film AG receives Amakasu's letter and sees an opportunity to promote German superiority. It sends Swiss director Emil N geli to Japan with a huge sum of money to make the film. Once there, N geli meets up with his fianc e, Ida, a German actress, but plans for the film quickly spin out of control. Nearly three-quarters of the novel is dedicated to asides and backstories, such as N geli's reveries about his recently deceased father. Some of these asides, like the one about Amakasu's disturbing childhood, are excellent, while others, like the description of an encounter with Fritz Lang on a train, frustratingly derail the more intriguing main plot, which is rushed through in the last 50 pages. Meanwhile, important elements of the story, including the motivations of the characters, are handled obliquely or in passing, which frequently keeps it at arm's length. Kracht's strangely filmic prose ("A cherry blossom falls in death, dies in falling; it is perfect like this") leads to some inspired moments and images, but readers may be disappointed by the novel's evasive attitude toward the story.
