Imperium

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

 > I think it was originally composed in English

Though I spend a lot of time reading Kracht and related research, I've 
never heard that. Got a source? Care to explain? Since Kracht's language 
is so elaborated - G. Seibt called it "the most beautiful German one can 
read today" -, it is of course possible that he cooks this up while 
playing around with other languages. As far as I know you're the first 
person to utter such a speculation.

Here's Kracht playing Ukulele at the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island:

https://www.facebook.com/57740086757/photos/a.90807176757.92559.57740086757/10153333895421758/?type=1&theater 



On 07.01.2015 13:59, Paul Gaver wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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>
>>     <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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