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An outrageous, fantastical, uncategorizable novel of obsession, adventure, and coconuts. In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg known as August Engelhardt establish 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 on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was 43 years old. Religious Kracht's Imperium uses the outlandish information on Engelhardt's life to build a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness. Engelhardt reaches once a sympathetic outsider - mocked, misinterpreted, physically assaulted - and a rigid ideologue, and his misguided notions of purity and his spiral into madness presage the horrors of the mid-20th century. Using the tropes of typical adventure stories like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, Kracht's novel, an international best vendor, is funny, bizarre, surprising, and poignant - sometimes all in the same minute. His allusions are misleading, his historical timelines are twisted, his narrator is unreliable - and the result is a novel that is also a reflection cupboard and a maze pitted with trapdoors. Both a provocative satire and a significant yoga on the fragility and audacity of individuals activity, Imperium is impossible to categorize, and absolutely unlike anything you've been told before.
