Swiss writer Kracht's bestselling, experimental 2012 novelbased on the life of a real persongets translated into English. Sick of civilization, August Engelhardt seeks a different kind of living. In the early 20th century, he purchases a coconut-rich Pacific island called Kabakon and, there, hopes to start a colony based on vegetarianism and the healing powers of the sun and coconuts. But Engelhardt is also a nudist, and this doesn't appeal so much to certain people ("no reason to lie naked on a beach," one potential partner tells him) and appeals a little too much to others. Nevertheless, Engelhardtsometimes mad, sometimes misguided, sometimes propheticforms bonds with several of the island's natives and finds a bit of peaceuntil a famous musician named Ltzow arrives and becomes an acolyte and, perhaps, a usurper, showing Engelhardt that not all attention is good. In this slim novel, Kracht uses the general outline of Engelhardt's life to cram a lot into a small space; the omniscient narrator, in language both formal ("Now that we have endeavored to tell of our poor friend's past") and informal ("to cut a long story short"), tells not only Engelhardt's story, but also the story of the birth of 20th-century science and demagoguery, touching on the world outside Engelhardt and including references to Einstein and Hitler. But what is one to make of this book ultimately? The language, florid and overstuffed with adverbs, harkens back to, and maybe parodies, an earlier style of writing, but to what end? The narrator jumps around in time, gets sidetracked, and sometimes seems barely interested in Engelhardt. "To wit: modernity had dawned; poets suddenly wrote fragmented lines," Kracht writes. Does this account for the novel's trapdoor style? Perhapsand some of Kracht's doors are more fun to fall into than others. To quote Kracht: "quite literary but somewhat awkward." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Kracht, a Swiss novelist, journalist, and screenwriter, here offers a fictionalized tale about August Engelhardt (1870-1919), a German citizen who founded a sun-worshipping, coconut-eating cult named "Order of the Sun." Using a family inheritance he purchased a small island, Kabakon, in Deutsch New Guinea, an island with many acres of coconut trees. Living as a nudist and vegetarian, promoting the healthy lifestyle described in his 1898 publication "A Carefree Future," August extols the benefits of eating the fruit growing closest to the sun and living a life of purity. Madness eventually takes hold of our hero and further isolates him from the few people on the island who care about him. Comparable to the adventure stories of Robert Louis -Stevenson, Jack London, and Daniel Defoe, albeit with a definite philosophical inclination, this amusing, fantastical tale features fabulous language, delightfully concocted descriptions, and an excellent translation by Bowles and should attract award interest. VERDICT Essential reading for those interested in the quirky characters of history, this would be an excellent choice for a book discussion group.-Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

IF, WHILE SPRAWLED in a deck chair or on the beach this summer, you crave a book whose tone and emotional landscape mirror your own state of torpor and cosseted relaxation, such a book would not be "Imperium." Although this very amusing and bracingly oddball novel by the Swiss writer Christian Kracht does feature several palm-covered islands - not to mention many gallons of coconut oil and copious amounts of undress - calling it a beach read is like calling "Psycho" maternal. Based on a true story, "Imperium," which was a best seller in Europe, is the fablelike account of a scrawny, nervous vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt. It is the early 1900s - in a century that "until just before the midpoint of its duration looked as if ... Germany would take its rightful place of honor and precedence at the table of nations" - and our bony, bearded idealist has set off for the German protectorates in the South Pacific to found a colony devoted to growing and eating only "the vegetal likeness of God." By which is meant: coconuts. This cocovorism does not go well. As with the trajectory of that more infamous Reich spearheaded by a deluded sometime-vegetarian utopianist German, the South Pacific commune hits bumpy patches. Engelhardt is duped and robbed by a fellow pilgrim; the first of his very few colonists has his way with a local boy who lives at the colony; and his business correspondence is quickly skimmed before being repurposed as toilet paper "in the staff privy of the accountant's office at a copper and bauxite mine." Oh, and Engelhardt not only contracts leprosy, but his overly targeted diet begets a "furious, paralyzed, inflamed derangement." At which point he severs one of his thumbs and puts it in a salt-filled coconut shell, like Jeffrey Dahmer at a tiki bar. By wedding a gimlet-eyed satire of historical faddism to a highly jaunty prose style, "Imperium" brings to mind the early work of T. Coraghessan Boyle. That said, a lot of Engelhardt's interactions with other humans are overly brief, more like skirmishes than relationships, which unfortunately plays up the random, "one damn thing after another" aspect of this picaresque. By the time, more than halfway through the book, Engelhardt gets his first truly devoted colonist - Max Lützow, a hypochondriacal musician from Berlin - it's clear that Kracht is not going to be tracing the fully satisfying and nuance-filled arc of two souls in concert. It might also have behooved Kracht to find a vehicle - a journal? a volleyball named Wilson? - to pinpoint some of the stages of his protagonist's descent into madness. But in the end, this barbed account of failed idealism shines a bright light on the ravages of obsession, all the while sprinkling the trail with memorably bizarre details. I won't soon forget the way one islander handles the awkward pauses that crop up in conversation with the pathologically shy Engelhardt: "Mrs. Forsayth pointed out the casuarina trees growing adjacent to her wooden palace, thickly festooned with fruit bats that dangled like cocoons from the leafless boughs and occasionally flailed about with their patagia, screeching. During high heat, she declared, fixing her gaze sternly on Engelhardt, the animals urinated over their own wings, and the evaporative cold produced by flapping then provided the desired cooling effect." Everybody chases his own utopia. Our hero will eat only 'the vegetal likeness of God.' By which he means: coconuts. HENRY ALFORD is the author of five books, including, most recently, "Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?"

Kracht's fascinating tale is an impressionistic portrait of a thumb-sucking, mad-for-coconuts German nudist. Set during the early 20th century and based on a real historical figure, the novel opens on a ship headed to the far-flung protectorate of New Pomerania in German New Guinea. Onboard is the shy, idealistic young August Engelhardt, who looks in horror at his "sallow, bristly, vulgar" countrymen as they gorge on heavy meals on deck. Disgusted by German society and its voracious appetite for meat and money, the vegetarian Engelhardt starts a coconut plantation on the remote South Seas island of Kabakon. There he subsists entirely on the "luscious, ingenious fruit," worships the sun sans clothes, and welcomes adherents to join his soul-cleansing retreat. Before descending into madness and revising his diet in a particularly ghoulish way, the lonely and loveless cocovore is repeatedly duped by con men, fakirs, and sensualists who profess to share his ascetic ideals but leave him more isolated than ever. Alternately languid and feverish, the narrative is as nutty as Engelhardt's prized foodstuff. The story bounces around in time, shifts in tone from philosophical to suspenseful to slapstick, features cameos from peculiar historical figures (such as the American inventor of Vegemite spread), and periodically widens its scope to consider the menacing rise of Nazism. Though Kracht, whose books have been translated into more than 25 languages, occasionally flaunts his research and succumbs to an overwrought style, he inventively captures the period's zeitgeist through one incurable eccentric. Agent: Markus Hofmann, Regal Literary. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.