Imperium : A Fiction of the South Seas
-- Treasure IslandImperium is impossible to categorize, and utterly unlike anything you've read before.
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Electronic books. |
- ISBN: 9780374709860
- Physical Description 1 online resource 192 pages
- Publisher [Place of publication not identified] : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Content descriptions
General Note: | Electronic book. |
Reproduction Note: | Electronic reproduction. [S.l.] Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2015 Available via World Wide Web. |
System Details Note: | Format: Adobe EPUB Requires: cloudLibrary (file size: 372.0 KB) |
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Imperium : A Fiction of the South Seas
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Summary
Imperium : A Fiction of the South Seas
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.