Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In The Dead, Award-winning author Christian Kracht presents a historical novel of international conspiracy, cinematic intrigue, and murder set before World War II, in the early years of the Axis powers' rise to tyranny.
In The Dead, the follow-up to his acclaimed novel Imperium (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year), Christian Kracht mines the feverish early days of Weimar Germany for 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 Nageli 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 Nageli 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 Nageli's film-star fiancee 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 Nageli's plans, forcing them to face their demons . . . and their doom.
Synopsis
"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 N geli 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 N geli 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 N geli's film-star fianc e 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 N geli'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. --Sj n