Event Highlights: European Voices- A Reading and Conversation with Swiss author Christian Kracht
On September 21, the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies was lucky enough to be visited by award-winning Swiss novelist Christian Kracht and translator Danny Bowles, Assistant Professor of German Studies at Boston College. Moderated by Sanjay Krishnan, Associate Professor of English at Boston University, the evening included a reading from Kracht’s latest novel, Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas, and a lively dialogue between Kracht, Bowles, and members of the Boston University community.
Kracht was born in Saanen, Switzerland. In his adolescence, he attended Schule Schloss Salem in Salem, Germany, and Lakefield College School in Ontario, Canada. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989, and now resides in Los Angeles with his wife, German film director Frauke Finsterwalder.
His novels are pastiche; a brilliant, playful blend of history and fiction, customarily centered on a protagonist embarking on a trans-cultural journey that usually ends in failure—and his latest conquest holds true to this formula.
Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas recounts the travails of a radical nudist vegetarian named August Engelhardt, who set sail in 1902 with a goal: to found a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts.
When August Engelhardt is first introduced, he is a fascinating, vegetarian, esoteric enigma who is even likened to Adolf Hitler. “Later in the book, he will move from being a vegetarian to [being] a cocoivore, and he ends up going absolutely insane,” expresses Kracht.
Engelhardt argues that man is God’s embodiment in the animal kingdom, but he then takes that notion even further and claims that the coconut is God’s embodiment in the plant kingdom. He refers to Engelhardt as a theophage, one who devours god, because of how much he worships coconuts. “Of course, initially, he sets out saying the coconut is a divine fruit, [as] it grows very high up on the palm tree, closest to god, and it resembles the human head with its hair,” explains Kracht. This absurd and grandiose kind of thinking was, however, in line with the times.
“Many other of these colonial experiments at this time were going to surface,” explains Kracht. “Engelhardt was a young man who comes out of the German turn of the century, which is very suppressed— one can compare it, perhaps, to Victorian England— and so basically he flees this repression to be naked and to be a radical vegetarian.”
While the work itself is fiction, Engelhardt was not a product of Kracht’s brilliant imagination—August Engelhardt was an actual historical figure who lived from 1875 to 1919. “Very little was known about Engelhardt’s life prior to my delving into it, and there was one thesis written on him at the University of Auckland,” remarked Kracht. Imperium is truly a unique piece in that Kracht is able to take a bizarre historical figure with an even stranger story and amplify its peculiarities even more.
Christian Kracht’s influence is undoubtedly widespread— his novels, including Faserland (1995), 1979 (2001), and I Will Be Here in Sunshine and in Shadow (2008), have been translated into twenty-seven different languages. Imperium was translated into English by Danny Bowles, Assistant Professor of German Studies at Boston College, to whom Kracht is incredibly grateful. “I came up to Boston and we went through [Bowles’ translation] together, and it was just the most wonderful co-production. I just think that as a translator, you have to develop your own poetology, you have to write the thing anew—you’re not just translating, you’re writing the novel again yourself,” details Kracht.
An eclectic fable about the inherent vacuous nature of extremism, Imperium won Kracht the 2012 Wilhelm Raabe literature prize and garnered approval of critics worldwide—and rightfully so. A stage adaptation premiered in April 2015 at the Thalia in der Gaußstraße in Hamburg, directed by Jan Bosse, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, a german film adaptation was in pre-production as of January 2015.
This event was co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut Boston and Swissnex Boston.
-Toria Rainey ‘18