The Dead (Christian Kracht)

[Charles Albert]

To anyone whose appetite may have been whetted by this tantalizing review...

The novel was released 12 days ago in the original.......those who, on
principle, abjure familiarity with the barbaric tongue in which the story
is written will have to wait several months for The Deciphering.

So, Kai, from all of us.....

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01ja-hEqvIs


love,
cfa



On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 9:20 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> I've read Christian Kracht's new novel *Die Toten* (The Dead) twice now
> and can recommend it strongly. It's set in the film industry during the
> transition from Weimar culture to the Third Reich, and tells the story of a
> Swiss director, Emil Nägeli, and a Japanese government official, Masahiko
> Amakasu, who try to create a collaboration between German and Japanese
> cinema. This is labeled the "celluloid axis" and it's directed against US
> imperialism. While being as harsh on the thanatoid aspects of these
> traditional cultures, especially German antisemitism, as the young Thomas
> Pynchon, Kracht articulates nevertheless a yearning for their idiosyncratic
> truths, which were still valid in the 1930s, before anglophone
> globalization started to strike everything with similarity. (Already in his
> debut novel *Faserland *from 1995, Kracht writes: " (...) Germany could
> be like this, if there wouldn't have been the war and if the Jews wouldn't
> have been gasified. Then Germany would be like the word Neckarauen" - p.
> 85; "Neckar" refers to the river, and "Auen" is the plural form of Aue,
> eng. (wet) meadow). In terms of art, it's the silent film in black & white
> which stands for uncorrupted art, as opposed to globalized
> commercialization.
>
> Early cinema, in all its artistic and also technical sophistication
> (echoes of AtD's photography!), is - the parallel of camera and machine gun
> gets pointed out more than once - pictured as an artistic model for a
> different modernity. The novel's action is set in Berlin, Switzerland, Camp
> Q/Canada, Japan and LA. It's three-part-structure follows that of the
> Japanese Noh theater (jo-ha-kiu). Among the real world characters popping
> up are Ernst Hanfstaengl (whose heraldic Harvard "Ve-ri-tas" slogan is one
> of the novel's running gags), Alfred Hugenberg, Fritz Lang, Lotte Eisner,
> Siegfried Kracauer, Heinz Rühmann and  - a mirror figure for both male main
> characters - Charles Chaplin, who first nearly gets murdered for political
> reasons and then commits an actual murder for more personal reasons
> himself. The book is as funny  - several Pynchonesque slapstick scenes - as
> it is uncanny: In the end, the female main character named Ida von Üxküll
> (actress, fiancee of Nägeli, lover of Amakasu) - does she stand for
> Germania? - finds a violent death in Hollywood ... And the beautiful
> language of *Die Toten* can, like that of its predecessor *Imperium*, be
> described as kinda Thomas-Mann-2.0.-German, which - with its often long and
> winding sentences - stands in contrast to the reductionist style à la Bret
> Easton Ellis which was so characteristic for Kracht's first three
> novels.(Corresponding to this, there's a change from first person narrator
> to authorial narrator.) Apart from Mann and Pynchon, there are also
> stylistic influences from Kleist, Nabokov and others. In single passages
> the sound might scratch the all-too-artifical, and there are minor
> violations of grammar too, but in its evocative power Kracht's language is
> unequaled in contemporary German literature. His prose is superior to other
> people's poetry. To give you an example of this, let me translate a
> paragraph that reminds me strongly of *Gravity's Rainbow*:
>
> "The seed thus was planted, like a sleeping rocket, and nothing should be
> able to smother its future growth, its star flight, neither Masahiko's
> superficial contempt for the Western world, nor - obviously aiming at
> expansion and the humiliation of other peoples - the soul of Germany, which
> the young man could sense with such an accuracy as if he himself had
> plugged into it with his own soul via etheric conductors." (p. 70)
>
> It's also, Kracht's father passed away five years ago, a novel on the
> relation of father and son.
>
> And there is, perhaps connected to this, a spiritual dimension to the text
> and its title, and here the famous Joyce story seems to be relevant too. A
> key passage from the novel (p. 167) is reprinted on the dust jacket's inner
> front side:
>
> "The dead are infinitely lonesome creatures, there is no solidarity among
> them, they are born alone, die, and also get reborn alone."
>
> Now my family is busy with this copy of *Die Toten*, --- but right after
> that I'll start my third read!
>
>
>
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