The Dead: A Novel - Hardcover

Kracht, Christian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374139679 ISBN 13: 9780374139674

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018

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 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.

"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." ―Sjón

About this title

About the Author

Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist whose books have been translated into thirty languages. The Dead was the recipient of the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize and the Swiss Book Prize.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374139679
• ISBN 13: 9780374139674
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208