Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas
(eBook)

Grouping Information

Hoopla Extract Information

stdClass Object
(
    [year] => 2015
    [artist] => Christian Kracht
    [fiction] => 1
    [coverImageUrl] => https://cover.hoopladigital.com/opr_9780374709860_270.jpeg
    [titleId] => 16763350
    [isbn] => 9780374709860
    [abridged] => 
    [language] => ENGLISH
    [profanity] => 
    [title] => Imperium
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    [pages] => 193
    [children] => 
    [artists] => Array
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                    [name] => Christian Kracht
                    [artistFormal] => Kracht, Christian
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            [0] => Fiction
            [1] => Literary
            [2] => Satire
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    [price] => 2.35
    [id] => 16763350
    [edited] => 
    [kind] => EBOOK
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    [upc] => 
    [synopsis] => 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.
    [url] => https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/16763350
    [pa] => 
    [subtitle] => A Fiction of the South Seas
    [publisher] => Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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)