Imperium

Starred review from April 27, 2015
Kracht's fascinating tale is an impressionistic portrait of a thumb-sucking, mad-for-coconuts German nudist. Set during the early 20th century and based on a real historical figure, the novel opens on a ship headed to the far-flung protectorate of New Pomerania in German New Guinea. Onboard is the shy, idealistic young August Engelhardt, who looks in horror at his "sallow, bristly, vulgar" countrymen as they gorge on heavy meals on deck. Disgusted by German society and its voracious appetite for meat and money, the vegetarian Engelhardt starts a coconut plantation on the remote South Seas island of Kabakon. There he subsists entirely on the "luscious, ingenious fruit," worships the sun sans clothes, and welcomes adherents to join his soul-cleansing retreat. Before descending into madness and revising his diet in a particularly ghoulish way, the lonely and loveless cocovore is repeatedly duped by con men, fakirs, and sensualists who profess to share his ascetic ideals but leave him more isolated than ever. Alternately languid and feverish, the narrative is as nutty as Engelhardt's prized foodstuff. The story bounces around in time, shifts in tone from philosophical to suspenseful to slapstick, features cameos from peculiar historical figures (such as the American inventor of Vegemite spread), and periodically widens its scope to consider the menacing rise of Nazism. Though Kracht, whose books have been translated into more than 25 languages, occasionally flaunts his research and succumbs to an overwrought style, he inventively captures the period's zeitgeist through one incurable eccentric. Agent: Markus Hoffmann, Regal Literary.

May 1, 2015
Swiss writer Kracht's bestselling, experimental 2012 novel-based on the life of a real person-gets translated into English. Sick of civilization, August Engelhardt seeks a different kind of living. In the early 20th century, he purchases a coconut-rich Pacific island called Kabakon and, there, hopes to start a colony based on vegetarianism and the healing powers of the sun and coconuts. But Engelhardt is also a nudist, and this doesn't appeal so much to certain people ("no reason to lie naked on a beach," one potential partner tells him) and appeals a little too much to others. Nevertheless, Engelhardt-sometimes mad, sometimes misguided, sometimes prophetic-forms bonds with several of the island's natives and finds a bit of peace...until a famous musician named Lutzow arrives and becomes an acolyte and, perhaps, a usurper, showing Engelhardt that not all attention is good. In this slim novel, Kracht uses the general outline of Engelhardt's life to cram a lot into a small space; the omniscient narrator, in language both formal ("Now that we have endeavored to tell of our poor friend's past") and informal ("to cut a long story short"), tells not only Engelhardt's story, but also the story of the birth of 20th-century science and demagoguery, touching on the world outside Engelhardt and including references to Einstein and Hitler. But what is one to make of this book ultimately? The language, florid and overstuffed with adverbs, harkens back to, and maybe parodies, an earlier style of writing, but to what end? The narrator jumps around in time, gets sidetracked, and sometimes seems barely interested in Engelhardt. "To wit: modernity had dawned; poets suddenly wrote fragmented lines," Kracht writes. Does this account for the novel's trapdoor style? Perhaps-and some of Kracht's doors are more fun to fall into than others. To quote Kracht: "quite literary but somewhat awkward."

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Starred review from July 1, 2015

Kracht, a Swiss novelist, journalist, and screenwriter, here offers a fictionalized tale about August Engelhardt (1870-1919), a German citizen who founded a sun-worshipping, coconut-eating cult named "Order of the Sun." Using a family inheritance he purchased a small island, Kabakon, in Deutsch New Guinea, an island with many acres of coconut trees. Living as a nudist and vegetarian, promoting the healthy lifestyle described in his 1898 publication "A Carefree Future," August extols the benefits of eating the fruit growing closest to the sun and living a life of purity. Madness eventually takes hold of our hero and further isolates him from the few people on the island who care about him. Comparable to the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, and Daniel Defoe, albeit with a definite philosophical inclination, this amusing, fantastical tale features fabulous language, delightfully concocted descriptions, and an excellent translation by Bowles and should attract award interest. VERDICT Essential reading for those interested in the quirky characters of history, this would be an excellent choice for a book discussion group.--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

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