Imperium

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Check this shit out! I've read it four times so far.
Definitely the straight dope --

Kracht is influenced by Pynchon. In "Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein 
und im Schatten", his third novel from 2008 which is alternate history 
and imagines Lenin wasn't allowed to return to Russia and thus made the 
revolution in Switzerland which then became the globally acting Swiss 
Soviet Republic,
the protagonist is an high rank soldier with African roots who in the 
end leads his people back to the African countryside. The inspiration by 
Enzian from "Gravity's Rainbow" is here obvious. "Imperium" now not only 
covers the time span of "Against the Day" but also samples genres the 
way Pynchon did there, as the Kracht scholar Johannes Birgfeld 
(Südseephantasien. Christian Krachts "Imperium" und sein Beitrag zur 
Poetik des deutschsprachigen Romans der Gegenwart, in: Wirkendes Wort 
62, 2012, Heft 3, pp. 457-477) pointed out. Presenting a personal 
observation, I can add that Kracht learned from Pynchon how to write 
good slapstick scenes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


  Imperium


    A Fiction of the South Seas

Christian Kracht; Translated from the German by Daniel Bowles

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  *
    Imperium
    <http://images.macmillan.com/folio-assets/macmillan_us_frontbookcovers_1000H/9780374175245.jpg>
    <http://images.macmillan.com/folio-assets/macmillan_us_frontbookcovers_1000H/9780374175245.jpg>


*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.

http://us.macmillan.com/imperium/christiankracht

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Unter den langen weißen Wolken, unter der prächtigen Sonne, unter dem 
hellen Firnament, da war erst ein langgedehntes Tuten zu hören, dann 
rief die Schiffsglocke eindringlich zum Mittag, und ein malayischer Boy 
schritt sanftfüßig und leise das Oberdeck ab, um jene Passagiere mit 
behutsamem Schulterdruck aufzuwecken, die gleich nach dem üppigen 
Frühstück wieder eingeschlafen waren. Der norddeutsche Lloyd, Gott 
verfluche ihn, sorgte jeden Morgen, reiste man denn in der ersten Klasse 
..."

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