Imperium

A Fiction of the South Seas

Fiction & Literature, Historical, Literary
Cover of the book Imperium by Christian Kracht, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Author: Christian Kracht ISBN: 9780374709860
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publication: July 14, 2015
Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Language: English
Author: Christian Kracht
ISBN: 9780374709860
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication: July 14, 2015
Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Language: English

An outrageous, fantastical, uncategorizable novel of obsession, adventure, and coconuts

In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to found a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was forty-three years old.
Christian Kracht's Imperium uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt's life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness. Engelhardt is at once a sympathetic outsider—mocked, misunderstood, physically assaulted—and a rigid ideologue, and his misguided notions of purity and his spiral into madness presage the horrors of the mid-twentieth century.
Playing with the tropes of classic adventure tales like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, Kracht's novel, an international bestseller, is funny, bizarre, shocking, and poignant—sometimes all on the same page. His allusions are misleading, his historical time lines are twisted, his narrator is unreliable—and the result is a novel that is also a mirror cabinet and a maze pitted with trapdoors. Both a provocative satire and a serious meditation on the fragility and audacity of human activity, Imperium is impossible to categorize, and utterly unlike anything you've read before.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

An outrageous, fantastical, uncategorizable novel of obsession, adventure, and coconuts

In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to found a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was forty-three years old.
Christian Kracht's Imperium uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt's life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness. Engelhardt is at once a sympathetic outsider—mocked, misunderstood, physically assaulted—and a rigid ideologue, and his misguided notions of purity and his spiral into madness presage the horrors of the mid-twentieth century.
Playing with the tropes of classic adventure tales like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, Kracht's novel, an international bestseller, is funny, bizarre, shocking, and poignant—sometimes all on the same page. His allusions are misleading, his historical time lines are twisted, his narrator is unreliable—and the result is a novel that is also a mirror cabinet and a maze pitted with trapdoors. Both a provocative satire and a serious meditation on the fragility and audacity of human activity, Imperium is impossible to categorize, and utterly unlike anything you've read before.

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