Kracht (Re: Allegedly, Sorta P)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

In terms of sales figures? No.

But regarding the artistic quality "Die Toten" (The Dead) is as good as 
its predecessor. Scroll down for my review from September 2016. (Spoken 
aside: On some days this place appears to be not a mailing list but a 
chatroom with massive personnel turnover ...)

Since I hadn't read Mishima back then, let me add the following: There 
are many references to this outstanding author in "The Dead". The very 
first chapter gives us a kind of suicide snuff movie, more accurate: a 
seppuku snuff movie, which of course refers to Mishima's ritual death on 
11/25/70, of which footage exist. Then there's the peephole scene where 
Nägeli secretly watches Ida & Amakasu having sex. This calls to mind a 
very similar scene in "The Temple of Dawn" (which is the third volume 
from the tetralogy "The Sea of Fertility"); it also, though to a lesser 
degree since the situation is not equally comparable, reminds me of a 
related setting in "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea". & the 
scene where Amakasu is burning down his school seems, in the given 
context, to evoke the arson at the end of "The Temple of the Golden 
Pavilion". (I'm sure that I could name more references, if my Mishima 
knowledge was better.) Actually the whole book can be seen as a 
Mishima-esque meditation by an European author. B-but of course you 
don't have to take this perspective. A Pynchonian angle of view will do 
fine for the first read. Just give it a try!

Thinking about Kracht in Anglophonia, an unavoidable question arises: 
Why are his first three novels - which belong together by style & of 
which Kracht speaks as his "Triptych" - not available in English? Since 
all three are pretty short (& since anglophone publishing houses tend to 
print significantly more words on a page), Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 
could publish them in one volume that would hardly have more than 300 
pages. ~ Perhaps like this? C.K.: Triptych (The Early Novels). Faserland 
- 1979 - I'll Be Here in Sunshine and in Shadow. Translated from the 
German by Daniel Bowles ~ I mean, these books have been translated into 
30 languages. & the quality of Kracht's early novels - "1979" is still 
my favorite of all - is first-rate. Does anybody know anything about 
this? (off is okay.)

Later this year a new Kracht novel will be published; no further details 
are known.

"The long-haired graybeard is taken to and shown around a confusingly 
large military base on the island of Guadalcanal, which was wrested away 
from the Japanese. Wide-eyed, he sees everywhere friendly black GIs 
whose teeth, quite unlike his own ruinously rotten heap of dental 
wreckage, gleam with a secret, surreal luminosity; everyone appears so 
extraordinarily clean, their hair parted and clothes pressed; he is 
given a dark brown, sugary, rather tasty liquid to drink from a glass 
bottle slightly tapered in the middle; sedulous fighter planes set down 
on runways at minute intervals and take off again (the pilots smile, 
waving, from glass cockpits, radiant in the sunlight); with an 
expression of rapt attention, an officer holds a metal box with small 
perforations to his ear, from which enigmatic, heavily rhythmic, but 
still not at all unpleasant-sounding music emanates; the old man's hair 
and beard are combed; an immaculately white cotton collarless camisole 
is pulled over his head; he's given a wristwatch; they pat him gaily on 
the back; this is now the imperium; he is served a type of sausage 
brushed with garishly bright-colored sauce that lies in a bed of oblong 
bread as soft as a down pillow, as a result of which Engelhardt, for the 
first time in long over half a century, ingests a piece of animal flesh; 
here, a soldier of German extraction (his parents simply forgot their 
language of origin---it was totally assimilated PARS PRO TOTO into the E 
PLURIBUS UNUM), one Lieutenant Kinnboot, in shirtsleeves, preparing with 
patient affability to ask Engelhardt dozens of questions for a 
newspaper, is mightily impressed when Engelhardt suddenly recalls the 
English language---which of course has grown somewhat rusty over the 
decades---and begins to speak, at first haltingly, then with increasing 
vivacity, of the age before the world war, no, not the one favorably 
just ended, but the one before that, even."

Imperium. A Fiction Of The South Seas, pp. 177-178


Am 11.07.18 um 10:51 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
>
> 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 <mailto: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!
>>
>>
>>
>

Am 17.07.20 um 03:51 schrieb Charles Albert:
> While the Germans are here...
>
> Did the follow up to Kracht's Imperium live up to the hype?
>
> love,
>
> cfa
>
>