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A Fiction of the South Seas
by Christian Kracht
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.
"Starred Review. 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." - Publishers Weekly
"To quote Kracht: 'quite literary but somewhat awkward.'" - Kirkus
"Imperium is astonishing and captivating, a tongue-in-cheek Conradian literary adventure for our time." - Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle
"Imperium is, first and foremost, one thing - marvelous literature." - Erhard Schütz, Der Freitag
This information about Imperium was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. His previous books include Faserland, 1979, and I Will Be Here, in Sunshine and in Shadow. Imperium was the recipient of the 2012 Wilhelm Raabe literature prize. Daniel Bowles is a visiting assistant professor of German studies at Boston College. His previous translations include novels by Thomas Meinecke and short texts by Alexander Kluge and Rainald Goetz.
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