The Dead: A Novel

by Christian Kracht Narrated by Julian Elfer

Overview

In The Dead, the follow-up to his acclaimed novel Imperium (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year), Christian Kracht mines the feverish film culture of the 1930s to produce a Gothic tale of global conspiracy, personal loss, and historical entanglements large and small.



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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Across [The Dead], Kracht leaves clues and tracks (perhaps traps) for the readers to connect (or tumble into), eschewing certainty through deliciously stimulating ambiguity in a remarkable, elegiac, sensual, often grotesque and hilarious novel. a remarkable, elegiac, sensual, often grotesque and hilarious novel." —Jan Wilm, The Los Angeles Review of Books

"The Dead reads like a reboot of J. G. Ballard’s Crash, in a treatment by Wes Anderson, after a weekend spent binge-watching John Schlesinger’s version of The Day of the Locust. The result draws out a comically bleak but shakily ambiguous vision of the coming image-world of fascist politics and Tinseltown productions, and of how both authorized a new power of the screen in startlingly effective ways." —Eric Banks, Bookforum

"[Christian] Kracht is one of the pre-eminent German-language authors of the last twenty years . . . Like any stylist, he courts his own readership and creates his own genre. And still, there is joy [in The Dead] for everyone, prose that astonishes, personal tragedies that mar the heart, and set pieces of outstanding oddness. When one is reading Kracht, one is nowhere else." —J.W. McCormack, Longreads

"Like Cabaret, Christian Kracht’s novel The Dead . . . evokes a brightly colored burlesque Weimar period . . . balance[d] precariously between real and unreal." —Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine

"Excellent ... some inspired moments and images." —Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

2018-06-18
A Swiss filmmaker gets ensnared in a plan to ensure Nazi domination of world cinema in this oddball historical fiction.Emil Nägeli has received some praise for his cinematic efforts, enough to draw the attention of the Nazi officials chafing at Hollywood's dominance of the world cinema market. With the luminaries of German cinema either dead (F.W. Murnau), decamped for Hollywood (Karl Freund), or, unknown to the authorities, about to (Fritz Lang), Nägeli is chosen as just prestigious enough and, perhaps, malleable. He is charged with making a film that will be such an artistic triumph that it will open cinema as a new front in the coming battle for world domination. His location for shooting, for reasons never really made clear, is Japan, where the Japanese film minister, Amakasu, has his own schemes for cultural domination. Also flitting through are Charlie Chaplin (in a plot that borders on slander) and the German film critics Lotte Eisner and Siegfried Kracauer. What this is supposed to add up to is anyone's guess, as the novel is interested in neither plot nor dramatization. Nearly half of the slim book is taken up with the childhood traumas of both Nägeli and Amakasu and any memories that have to do with ear wax or rotting teeth. There is no sense that Nägeli is under any pressure from Nazi officials, and the vague overtures to making him a figure of resistance don't amount to much. Nothing has any weight here. Fritz Lang escapes Germany as if he were simply catching a train to the country. And the reader is given no reason to care about either the characters or what story there is given the cold detachment with which all are portrayed.Imagine Weimar Germany as Night of the Living Dead minus the thrills.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171244811
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	07/17/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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