The Dead (Christian Kracht)

[Charles Albert]

Thank you....


https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/kornbluthcm-thatshareofglory/kornbluthcm-thatshareofglory-00-h.html


love,

cfa


On Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 4:51 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
wrote:

>
> Soon you will have the possibility to read the novel in translation:
> "The Dead" will be out in the US on July 17th.
>
> https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374139674
> https://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9780374139674
>
> "Er muß also lernen, seinem - hüstel - schweizerischen Geiste uneigene
> Banalitäten von sich zu geben, Formeln herunterzuspulen, fährt es ihm durch
> den Kopf." (p. 148)
>
> Am 21.09.2016 um 14:35 schrieb 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!
>>
>>
>>
>
>