Imperium

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 43 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-20th century. Playing with the tropes of classic adventure tales like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, Kracht's novel, an international best seller, is funny, bizarre, shocking, and poignant - sometimes all