Imperium_A Fiction of the South Seas by Christian Kracht

Author:Christian Kracht [Kracht, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374709860
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

VIII

Only once more did Engelhardt leave the Bismarck Archipelago before everything went down the drain, so to speak. He had begun to consider the possibility of no longer paying his debts because he of course had to begin rejecting the complex, pernicious structure of the capitalist system somewhere. A pen friend from Heidelberg who led the more-than-gloomy existence of a completely impoverished adjunct scholar at that famous university confided in him that there was a young German man quite near Engelhardt who had set about translating into reality a similar—at least intellectually related—world of thought, someone living on a Pacific island, too, emulating the anorexia mirabilis of one Blessed Columba of Rieti who ingested no nourishment, none at all, except the golden light of the sun. The person in question lived on the Fiji Islands, and wasn’t that just a stone’s throw away, and wouldn’t Engelhardt like to visit there one day?

Well, now, highly interesting, Engelhardt thought, putting aside the letter and opening a somewhat dated but still quite usable atlas; Fiji lay as far away from the protectorate as Australia, albeit not in a southerly, but in an easterly direction. One would perhaps be able to travel by way of the New Hebrides. As his fingers traced the route across the blue-inked expanse of the Pacific Ocean, he shoved his right thumb into his mouth and sucked on it, unawares. This quirk had been driven out of him with heavy beatings when he was a child, and he had discovered it for himself again, herkos odonton, as the tried-and-true expedient of a technique of meditation known only to him. Whenever he sank into a void within himself, sucking his thumb allowed him to block out the environment almost completely, indeed, to withdraw to such a degree that he was protected from each and every irritation surging onto the shores of his consciousness as if from a voracious moth by a particularly finely woven mosquito net.

And so he put on his lap-lap, filled a sack with coconuts, sailed over to Herbertshöhe, and inquired after the arrival of the French mail boat to Port Vila, which coincidentally, as if his journey were indeed part of some cosmic plan, was to reach New Pomerania the next day (the Messageries Maritimes ran this route only twice per year exactly). He borrowed the fare for the cheapest ticket from the postmaster, who was always well disposed toward him, and embarked the following day, barefoot, on the Gérard de Nerval, unrolling his coir mat on the quarterdeck in the very same manner as those natives who, bashful and almost invisible, had to undertake a voyage aboard the great ships of the white men. His intention to slip aboard the Gérard de Nerval secretly so as not to have to touch any more impure money he had quickly discarded.

The few Frenchmen who did not completely ignore him thought him an artist wallowing in primitivism, a German version of their Gauguin, ergo a thoroughly laughable figure who—and

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