Imperium

[John Bailey]

Loving what I've read of this excerpt so far - very Pynchonesque:
http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9780374175245

On Sat, Jul 11, 2015 at 9:27 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> On 07.01.2015 22:44, James Kyllo wrote:
>
>  English version not out until July it appears though..
>
>
> Out now!
>
> > After a long and remarkably fruitful translation process, Farrar, Straus
> and Giroux of New York finally publishes "Imperium US Edition
> <https://www.facebook.com/Imperiumnovel>. A Fiction of the South Seas" in
> English, available as of now. This is Christian Kracht`s very first English
> language translation.<
>
> Kracht will discuss his novel in Los Angeles on Tuesday (7/14):
>
> 19:30 (PDT)
>
> Skylight Books
> 1818 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles 90027
>
> Skylight Books, publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the Goethe-Institut
> of Los Angeles and the consulate of Switzerland present Christian Kracht
> discussing his book "Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas".
>
> https://www.facebook.com/mr.christiankracht?fref=nf
>
>
> 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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>
>
>
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