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Imperium
Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas | Christian Kracht
5 posts | 4 read | 8 to read
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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Jari-chan
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I love Krachts language in this one (sometimes rated as not readable) and also the humour you'll find every now and then. To me it felt like some kind of Anti-Robinson Crusoe, based on real people but the happenings are fictional. Still, this story could have happened.

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Johanna414
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Thank you so much @catiewithac for the books and goodies! I‘ve never heard of Imperium, but I‘m totally intrigued! I absolutely adore all the bookish goodies, especially the bag! What a great way to start Christmas week!
#blinddatebookswap @TheReadingMermaid

catiewithac Happy bookedmus!! 6y
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JWoollen
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When a book you've been waiting to savor (well, two books if we include the blurry one off to the left) is as wonderful as you'd hoped.

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peggyriley
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Have just started this mad tale of life among the coconuts in the German South Seas.

1 like2 stack adds