Imperium

[Paul Gaver]

I can also highly, highly recommend Imperium. One of the better fictionalized parodies of the romantic fever dream, next to, well, you know...

I think it was originally composed in English and then translated too, so the English might be nice. 

-PG

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 7, 2015, at 6:18 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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 
> <mime-attachment.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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