In The Dead, the follow-up to his acclaimed novel Imperium (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year), Christian Kracht mines the feverish film culture of the 1930s to produce 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 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.
Release date:
July 16, 2019
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print pages:
208
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There hadn’t been a rainier May in Tokyo for decades; the smudgy grayness streaking the overcast sky had been dimming to a deep, deep indigo day after day; hardly anyone could recall such cataclysmic quantities of water. Hats, coats, kimonos, uniforms had become shapeless and ill-fitting; book leaves, documents, scrolls, maps began to warp. There, a wayward, imprudent butterfly was struck down in midflight by rainstorms, down to the asphalt, whose water-filled depressions tenaciously reflected the luminous neon signs and paper lamps of restaurants at night: artificial light, cleaved and divided up by the arrhythmic pelting of endless downpours.
A handsome young officer had committed some transgression or other, and he now intended to punish himself in the living room of an altogether nondescript house in the western part of the city.
The lens of the camera was inserted into a corresponding aperture in the wall of the adjoining room, the hole’s edges insulated with strips of fabric so that the humming of the apparatus might not disturb the delicate scene within. Kneeling down, the officer opened his white jacket left and right, and with almost imperceptibly trembling yet precisely searching fingertips, he located the correct spot and leaned forward, grasping for the wispy-sharp tanto lying before him on a sandalwood block.
He paused, listening, hoping to hear once more the sound of the falling rain, but there was merely a quiet and mechanical whirring behind the wall.
Immediately after the brightly polished tip of the dagger had pierced the bellywrap and the fine white skin of the abdomen underneath, its gentle concavity encircled by only a few black hairs, the blade slid through the soft tissue into the man’s innards—and a fountain of gore sprayed sideways toward the exquisite calligraphy of the kakejiku.
It looked as if the cherry-red blood had been intentionally spattered by an artist who had shaken out his brush with a single, whiplike motion of his wrist across the scroll hanging there in the alcove in delicate simplicity.
Grunting with pain, the dying man slumped over, nearly losing consciousness, and then with tremendous effort righted himself again. Erect, he drew the knife now lodged in him across his body laterally, from left to right, and then he looked up, past the hole through which the camera was filming him; at length, he spat blood thickened to a glistening gelatinous mass, and his eyes grew dim and vacant. Arrangements had been made to leave the camera running.
After the film had been developed, a copy of it, sealed in oily cellophane, was carried carefully through the rain. The last streetcars ran around eleven o’clock in the evening. One had taken pains to deliver the print punctiliously and on time.
2.
The film director Emil Nägeli, from Bern, sat uncomfortably upright inside the rattletrap metal fuselage of an airplane, biting and tearing at his fingertips. It was spring. How his brow became moist, how he rolled his eyes in nervous tension—believing he could sense the approach of an imminent disaster—how he sucked and gnawed. And while his skin grew sore and red from the pressure of his teeth, he envisioned time and again that the plane would suddenly burst apart in the sky with a flash of light.
It was dreadful; he was at the end of his tether. Polishing his round spectacle lenses, he stood up to visit the lavatory—but raising the toilet lid, to his horror, he was able to see down and out through the hole into the emptiness below, so he returned to his seat in the cabin, drumming the cover page of a glossy magazine with his marred fingertips and eventually asking for a drink that never arrived.
Nägeli was traveling from Zurich to the new Berlin, the spleen of that insecure, unstable nation of Germans. Beneath him the dappled forests of the Thurgau drifted by—for a time the glinting of Lake Constance was visible—and then he espied down below the secluded, desolate villages of a Frankish lowland beset by shadows. The airplane took him ever northward, beyond Dresden, until shapeless clouds once more obscured his view.
Soon they made their tinny, turbulent descent—for some reason he was informed that the plane was to undergo repairs at Berlin’s Central Airport; apparently something in the propeller housing was defective. He wiped his clammy forehead with the end of his tie. And then, finally, with apologies, he was served a cup of coffee. Hardly sipping it, he looked out the window into the fathomless white.
His father had died a year ago. All of a sudden, as if his father’s passing had perhaps been an initial sign of his own mortality, middle age had set in, unnoticed, overnight, with all its prudishly concealed, secretly suffered mawkishness, its perennial purple self-pity. Now all that would follow was old age, an era of feebleness, and nothing more thereafter but a void that to Nägeli seemed wholly grotesque, which is why he worried at his fingers, the skin of which had now peeled away in milky, translucent little shreds.
At home in Switzerland he had often dreamed of stepping out into his snow-covered garden in winter, stripped naked, of leaning over to perform some breathing exercises and knee bends, and of observing the ravens circling overhead in search of sustenance amid the snow. They glided gracefully beneath leaden skies, without any consciousness of themselves. He would notice neither the numbing cold on his bare feet, nor the crystalline-whirling snowdrifts, nor the tearlet that fell forth into the frost.
Someone would shout Cut! and an assistant would prepare a close-up of the tear and approach the actor with a pipette. Nägeli would persist in his squat, holding his pose. At the same time, he would open his eyes widely so he could cry naturally with greater ease should the artificial tear, as was often the case, seem too theatrical.
At that instant Nägeli would become aware of standing both before and behind the camera, and he would feel a malignant, disturbing shudder at this disjointedness, and it was then that he would usually awake.
Emil Nägeli was a rather likeable man; in conversation he would frequently lean forward slightly; he would display great civility that never seemed contrived; blond, soft, yet somewhat stern eyebrows gave way to a pointy Swiss nose; he was sensitive and alert, as if his nerves extended beyond his skin, and consequently was quick to blush; he harbored a healthy skepticism of the entrenched worldviews of others; above his weak chin were set the supple lips of a sulking child; he wore subtly patterned English suits of dark-brown wool whose somewhat abbreviated trouser legs ended in cuffs; he liked to smoke cigarettes, now and then a pipe, and was not a drinker; from watery blue eyes he gazed into a sorrowful and wondrous world.
He pretended to like eating hard-boiled eggs with coarse bread and butter and slices of tomato more than anything else, but in truth he intensely disliked the process of consuming food, which bored and, indeed, occasionally repulsed him. And thus, whenever by supper he had again ingested nothing but coffee, his friends tended to suffer from his unpleasant moods, brought on by his low blood-sugar levels.
Nägeli was losing his light-blond hair, on both his brow as well as his crown; he had begun combing a lengthy strand from his temple over his thus repudiated pate. To conceal the gradual, persistent slackening of his double chin, he had grown a full beard that, disappointed at the result, he had hastily shaven off again; those wrinkly dark-bluish rings under his eyes, which used to appear in the mirror only in the brightness of morning, now no longer faded over the course of the day; his sight, were he to remove his varied spectacles, grew more myopic by degrees, blurry haziness set in; and his full-moon-shaped belly, which stood in marked contrast to the rest of his slender frame, could no longer be sucked in rigorously enough to be made invisible. He began to sense an all-encompassing limpness, an attenuation of the body, a steadily accruing, dumbfounded melancholy in the face of death’s impertinence.
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