the dead (sebastian kracht, tr. daniel bowles)

The Dead, portentous title aside, is like a delicious if slightly unsatisfying first course. It’s a slim novel, which takes a lot on. The narrative recounts the story of a Swiss film director, Emil Nägeli, who is commissioned by a Nazi director of culture in the early days of the Third Reich to make a German language film in Japan. This offers the novelist Pynchonesque scope, which he takes advantage of. The action flits from Japan to Switzerland to Berlin, back to Japan, to Hollywood and finally Zurich once more. It takes in figures including Chaplin, whose visit to Japan is skilfully interwoven into the narrative, Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang, and others. The Berlin sequence, where Nägeli spends a whirlwind few days, is brilliantly realised. One half-expects Nägeli to run into a pre-GI Slothrop. However, the bittiness of the book ultimately works against it. The pages end up feeling like fragments from a larger novel which hasn’t been written. The narrative hop, skips and jumps until it runs out of steam.