pronoun, “you.” “You” thus becomes one of the characters taking action throughout the novel. In this manner, the novel’s structure makes readers complicit in its story and also a part of contemporary Zimbabwe. This practice renders its people familiar enough to become “mourned.” Elisa Cogbill-Seiders University of Nevada, Las Vegas Christian Kracht The Dead Trans. Daniel Bowles. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 195 pages. Our hero, the no-longer-young Swiss director Emil Nägeli, with thus far one cuttingedge film to his credit, finds himself, his natively sober judgment loosened by liquor, entering a “Faustian pact”: he will go to Japan to inject German cinematic panache into that country’s film efforts. He makes this pact with Alfred Hugenberg, then head of the German film conglomerate UFA, who would shortly turn it over to the Nazi Party as he became its new government’s minister of economics. Christian Kracht has situated us on the very brink of the Nazi dictatorship. In the last gasps of the Weimar Republic, Nägeli’s summons to Berlin came just in time for him to meet the prominent film critics Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner, who are shortly afterward on the midnight train to Paris. Hugenberg makes sure Nägeli understands that these two are hardly part of his Nordic set—of which we meet leading German actor Heinz Rühmann and manabout -town Putzi Hanfstaengl—though he also observes later that he was not about to sacrifice a true German on this Japanese mission when a mere Swiss would suffice. The mission is to form a “celluloid axis” between Germany and Japan to beat back the burgeoning dominance of American film. As in the original Faustian deal, there are higher powers and purposes behind these machinations: the project has been engineered by top strategists of Japanese statecraft who mean to channel German cinematic acumen to achieve their country’s imperial pan-Asian ambitions. History, we know, turned out otherwise, but Nägeli makes the best of his initially unsuccessful sojourn in Japan, using his new cameras to explore remote and exotic aspects of the country. The footage he brings back, titled the same as this book, gets the attention of Swiss journalists, one of whom lauds the director as “avant-garde and surrealist ” (another finds “mentally deficient” more fitting). He is granted a guest professorship at his hometown university of Bern. Knowing this bit of the plot will not spoil reading Kracht’s novel. Its pleasures lie elsewhere. They are not avant-garde, instead harkening back to the baroque with even the occasional rococo ornament in the book’s idiosyncratic style and luminous images. Unlike the films of that era, Kracht’s novel exposes the reader to a vast array of color, especially a surfeit of the bright reds of blood and of the ubiquitous Nazi flags signaling all too ominously this most tragically surreal moment in recent history. All this has once again been masterfully translated by Daniel Bowles, who makes it easy to see that, unlike Nägeli’s perhaps sometimes-soporific one, a film of this novel would be brilliant indeed. Ulf Zimmermann Kennesaw State University Toshiki Okada The End of the Moment We Had Trans. Sam Malissa. London. Pushkin Press. 2018. Playwright and novelist Toshiki Okada (b. 1973) offers two uncomfortable vignettes of young people adrift in a world apparently without safe harbor in The End of the Moment We Had. The characters flail about, grasping at chimera posing as stable manifestations of a relationship yet never find succor, save in awkwardly constructed moments of memory. The disjuncture among purpose, existence , and belonging in their lives finds voice in the structure of the stories marked by a sense of inescapable fragmentation. In the first, the point of view shifts jarringly from person to person, each striving to present a coherent picture yet failing to do so convincingly. In the second, a despondent wife projects onto her imagination of her husband’s activities a series of narratives that seek to construct order and give meaning to her otherwise unremarkable existence. That the twist at the end feels contrived and unsuccessful serves only to emphasize the...