Reviews
" The Dead reads like a reboot of J. G. Ballard's Crash , in a treatment by Wes Anderson, after a weekend spent binge-watching John Schlesinger's version of The Day of the Locust . The result draws out a comically bleak but shakily ambiguous vision of the coming image-world of fascist politics and Tinseltown productions, and of how both authorized a new power of the screen in startlingly effective ways." --Eric Banks, Bookforum "Like Cabaret , Christian Kracht's novel The Dead . . . evokes a brightly colored burlesque Weimar period . . . balance[d] precariously between real and unreal." --Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine "Excellent ... some inspired moments and images." -- Publishers Weekly, " The Dead reads like a reboot of J. G. Ballard's Crash , in a treatment by Wes Anderson, after a weekend spent binge-watching John Schlesinger's version of The Day of the Locust . The result draws out a comically bleak but shakily ambiguous vision of the coming image-world of fascist politics and Tinseltown productions, and of how both authorized a new power of the screen in startlingly effective ways." --Eric Banks, Bookforum "[Christian] Kracht is one of the pre-eminent German-language authors of the last twenty years . . . Like any stylist, he courts his own readership and creates his own genre. And still, there is joy [in The Dead ] for everyone, prose that astonishes, personal tragedies that mar the heart, and set pieces of outstanding oddness. When one is reading Kracht, one is nowhere else." --J.W. McCormack, Longreads "Like Cabaret , Christian Kracht's novel The Dead . . . evokes a brightly colored burlesque Weimar period . . . balance[d] precariously between real and unreal." --Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine "Excellent ... some inspired moments and images." -- Publishers Weekly, "A great Faustian fable, and a literary endeavor of historical ingenuity that we now may start to characterize as Krachtian." -Karl Ove Knausgaard, "Across [ The Dead ], Kracht leaves clues and tracks (perhaps traps) for the readers to connect (or tumble into), eschewing certainty through deliciously stimulating ambiguity in a remarkable, elegiac, sensual, often grotesque and hilarious novel. a remarkable, elegiac, sensual, often grotesque and hilarious novel." --Jan Wilm, The Los Angeles Review of Books " The Dead reads like a reboot of J. G. Ballard's Crash , in a treatment by Wes Anderson, after a weekend spent binge-watching John Schlesinger's version of The Day of the Locust . The result draws out a comically bleak but shakily ambiguous vision of the coming image-world of fascist politics and Tinseltown productions, and of how both authorized a new power of the screen in startlingly effective ways." --Eric Banks, Bookforum "[Christian] Kracht is one of the pre-eminent German-language authors of the last twenty years . . . Like any stylist, he courts his own readership and creates his own genre. And still, there is joy [in The Dead ] for everyone, prose that astonishes, personal tragedies that mar the heart, and set pieces of outstanding oddness. When one is reading Kracht, one is nowhere else." --J.W. McCormack, Longreads "Like Cabaret , Christian Kracht's novel The Dead . . . evokes a brightly colored burlesque Weimar period . . . balance[d] precariously between real and unreal." --Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine "Excellent ... some inspired moments and images." -- Publishers Weekly
