{"product_id":"9780374709860","title":"Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn outrageous, fantastical, uncategorizable novel of obsession, adventure, and coconuts \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e     Christian Kracht's \u003ci\u003eImperium\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e     Playing with the tropes of classic adventure tales like \u003ci\u003eTreasure Island\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eRobinson Crusoe\u003c\/i\u003e, 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, \u003ci\u003eImperium\u003c\/i\u003e is impossible to categorize, and utterly unlike anything you've read before.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Farrar, Straus and Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47118291304688,"sku":"9780374709860","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780374709860_p0.jpg?v=1769916017","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780374709860","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}