Imperium Quotes

“Yes, indeed, the coconut—the delectable thought now revealed itself to him—was in truth the theosophical grail! The open shell with the meat and the sweet milk within was thus not just a symbol for, but in actual fact the body and blood of Christ.”
― Christian Kracht, Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas

“Thus, the seizure of the island Kabakon by our friend looked quite different depending on the viewpoint from which one observed the scenario and who one actually was. This splitting of reality into various components was, however, one of the chief characteristics of the age in which Engelhardt's story takes place. To wit: modernity had dawned; poets suddenly wrote fragmented lines; grating and atonal music, which to unschooled ears merely sounded horrible, was premiered before audiences who shook their baffled heads, was pressed into records and reproduced, not to mention the invention of the cinematograph, which was able to render our reality exactly as tangible and temporally congruent as it occurred; it was as if it were possible to cut a slice of the present and preserve it in perpetuity between the perforations of a strip celluloid.

All this, however, did not move Engelhardt; he was on his way toward withdrawing not only from modernity dawning the world over, but altogether from what we non-Gnostics denote as progress, as, well, civilization. Engelhardt took a decisive step forward onto the shore; in reality, it was a step back into a barbarism most exquisite.”
― Christian Kracht, Imperium