Imperium

[James Kyllo]

English version not out until July it appears though..

On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 11:18 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
>
>    -  [image: 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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