Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas
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- Synopsis
- 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.
- Copyright:
- 2016
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 192 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780374709860
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780374175245
- Publisher:
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Date of Addition:
- 03/27/24
- Copyrighted By:
- Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Literature and Fiction, Humor
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
- Translator:
- Daniel Bowles