Christian Kracht’s novel “Imperium” tells the story of a vegetarian nudist with control-freak tendencies who tries to found a commune in German New Guinea in the early 20th century. Complications ensue.
“Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas”
by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 179 pp., $22
Swiss novelist Christian Kracht must have felt he’d the hit historical-fiction jackpot when he came across the story of August Engelhardt, a longhair vegetarian nudist who founded a coconut-centric commune in German New Guinea in 1902.
The resulting novel, “Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas,” nabbed Germany’s prestigious Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize in 2012.