Imperium : Roman. Wilhelm-Raabe-Literaturpreis der Stadt Braunschweig und des Deutschlandfunks

ISBN-13: 9783596185351 / Niemiecki / Miękka / 2013 / 256 str.

Christian Kracht

Opis

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.

O autorze

In Saanen in der Schweiz wurde Christian Kracht am 29. Dezember 1966 geboren. Nach der Schule nahm er in den USA das Studium der Filmwissenschaften auf, arbeitete bei verschiedenen Presseerzeugnissen und begann dann zu reisen - durch Asien ebenso wie durch Afrika oder den Südpazifik. Er zählt zu den modernen deutschsprachigen Schriftstellern. Seine Werke sind in 30 Sprachen übersetzt. 2012 erhielt Christian Kracht den Wilhelm-Raabe-Preis, für den Roman »Die Toten« 2016 den Schweizer Buchpreis sowie den Hermann-Hesse-Literaturpreis; als auch 2022 den Wolfgang-Koeppen-Preis.. Zuletzt erschien der Roman »Eurotrash« (2021).