Imperium

One of
Publishers Weekly's Ten Best Books of the Year: An uncategorizable, "astonishing and captivating" novel of obsession, adventure, and coconuts (Karl Ove Knausgaard,
New York Times-bestselling author of
My Struggle).
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.
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, Christian Kracht's 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, by a recipient of the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize and the Swiss Book Prize, is impossible to categorize, and utterly unlike anything you've read before.
"This barbed account of failed idealism shines a bright light on the ravages of obsession, all the while sprinkling the trail with memorably bizarre details." -
The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"A delightful historical farce." -
The Wall Street Journal
"A tongue-in-cheek Conradian literary adventure for our time." -Karl Ove Knausgaard
"[A] strange, engrossing tale, by turns slapstick, philosophical, and suspenseful." -
Publishers Weekly

Christian Kracht; Translated from the German by Daniel Bowles