Imperium
Christian Kracht
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
<p><B>An outrageous, fantastical, uncategorizable novel of obsession, adventure, and coconuts <BR></B>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.<BR> Christian Kracht's <I>Imperium</I> 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&#8212;mocked, misunderstood, physically assaulted&#8212;and a rigid ideologue, and his misguided notions of purity and his spiral into madness presage the horrors of the mid-twentieth century.<BR> Playing with the tropes of classic adventure tales like <I>Treasure Island</I> and <I>Robinson Crusoe</I>, Kracht's novel, an international...</BR></BR></BR></p>