Imperium
-
- $5.900
-
- $5.900
Descripción editorial
Virtuosismo y diversión en una novela de aventuras, Christian Kracht presenta en Imperium una historia en que la comedia y el horror están equilibrados con gran acierto.
Son los años previos a la Primera Guerra Mundial, en la época en que el sueño colonial inunda el Imperio alemán. Para hacer realidad sus anhelos, August Engelhardt se embarca en un buque de vapor rumbo a Nueva Guinea, para instalarse finalmente en la pequeña isla de Kabakon.
Engelhardt se adentra en la selva persiguiendo su visión: una perfecta encarnación de las fantasías imperialistas. Su proyecto delirante atraerá adeptos que se unirán a él para engrosar las filas de la secta que ha creado.
Su plan, sin embargo, está destinado a fracasar penosamente.
Inspirado en un personaje que realmente existió, nos adentra en una espiral narrativa surrealista en la que sobrevuelan los fantasmas de Thomas Mann, Corto Maltés, Kafka, Hitler y Einstein. Una exploración divertida y caricaturesca dela arrogancia y la fragilidad de la conducta humana.
Reseña:
«Imperium es una novela de iniciación como las de antes.»
Elfriede Jelinek, premio Nobel de Literatura
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
