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Episode 9: "Imperium" by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles
91 Plays1 year ago
This week we dive into Christian Kracht's Imperium, and boy do we ever go deep (sorry/not sorry). It's an incredible piece of historical fiction (one of Tom's favorites and, now, one of Lori's) that follows one man's attempts to manifest his destiny to live in the tropics and subsist only on the noble coconut. And walk around nude. In the German South Pacific holdings at the turn of the 20th Century. There's a lot going on here and we had a great time chatting about it and hope you'll enjoy it, too.
In fact, we had such a good time talking about it we didn't reference any other books, other than the only other title available in English from Kracht, The Dead. So definitely give that one a look, too!
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Music: “Estos Dias” by Enrique Urquijo
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction: Lost in Redonda Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda.
Summer Adventures: Tornado in Chicago & London Bookstores
00:00:25
Speaker
Hey, Lori. How are you doing?
00:00:28
Speaker
Tom, I'm doing really well. How's your summer going?
00:00:31
Speaker
That's going pretty well. Again, we can play the game of, can you guess when we recorded this particular portion of the podcast? But yesterday we had tornado sirens in Chicago and a tornado touchdown right near O'Hare airport. So that was exciting. But beyond that, yeah, it's just been a hot kind of nice summer taking the kids swimming as much as possible and that whole sort of thing. And you just got back from a trip, yeah?
00:01:00
Speaker
Yeah, I just got back from London, not to, well, last week actually. That was really nice. It was lovely to have a break from the 100 plus temperatures in Dallas and go to gray, cloudy skies London.
00:01:21
Speaker
Um, you know, visited a lot of bookstores, new and used, brought back a lot of books. Um, so yeah, had a really great time. So good summer so far here too. Good. And just as by means of plugging across the pond, you got to see your collaborator, uh, on that in person, right, Sam?
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah, we met up in Cambridge. We took a train from London to Cambridge. It's about an hour train ride, and Sam went to Cambridge. So he came down from Norwich to meet us, and we went punting on the Cam River, which was an experience. It was a little bit like bumper boats. It was so crowded. It was a Saturday afternoon. There were graduations going on.
00:02:08
Speaker
everyone it seemed that wasn't at a graduation ceremony was on the river so it made it kind of difficult for maneuvering the boat you know had had a few drinks at some pubs and yeah it was really great to see him and to catch up because we only see each other maybe once a year of that so it was nice very cool so on
00:02:37
Speaker
Today's backlist focus.
Exploring Imperium: A Bizarre and Funny Novel
00:02:39
Speaker
We're going to be discussing Imperium by Christian Croc, translated by Daniel Bowles. This was my recommendation. It's a book I was talking about before we started recording, I'm pretty sure I picked it up and read it because of the second of Croc's books that
00:03:00
Speaker
was that came out in translation recently the dead that came up on my radar, and I was intrigued. And so I also went and grabbed Imperium first and read it I'm pretty sure that's how it went, and I was floored. I really really love this book, I think it's.
00:03:17
Speaker
delightfully bizarre, very, very funny. It's a incredible novel of ideas and manias. And it's 175 pages yet somehow crams in, I don't know, more action and more than a lot of novels double its length. What did you think of it, Laurie?
00:03:42
Speaker
Well, you're a very good recommender, Tom, and I guess that's your book-selling chops coming to the fore. So, I've liked everything that you've recommended. This, so far, is my favorite.
00:03:57
Speaker
So wild. So funny. And as I told you before we started recording, I knew really nothing about it going in. And I still really don't know much about it or about the author coming out after finishing it. But I thought it was just a wonderful, crazy work of imagination. But you told me yes and no.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, and so this is something I didn't actually look into the first time I read it. It's only like reading it the second time around and kind of poking around a little bit more that I came across the fact that this is historical fiction, but it's even more than that. I mean, it's pulling almost every single character in this novel.
00:04:47
Speaker
was a real person, was alive and interacting with each other at this time in this place. Obviously tons of fictional liberties taken and all that, but August Engelhardt, the focus, the protagonist of the novel was a real person and his beliefs were exactly what they were presented as in the novel.
00:05:14
Speaker
Um, and we'll get into those in just a second, but yeah, it's, it's really, I mean, we kind of saw this a bit with even, um, I was about to say gobs grief, but Job's grief. Um,
00:05:26
Speaker
I'm never not going to call it gob. It's just stuck in my head now. In Job's grief, as we discussed, there were a ton of real historical figures who are beyond even just Walt Whitman that populated that novel. This one is almost even more so in that I'm sure if you went through it with a fine tooth comb, you would absolutely come up with a number of completely fictional characters.
00:05:52
Speaker
I don't know that you find that many, most of the characters in this not most of the name characters in this novel were real people alive in Oceania at this time, and that's, in some ways, I think that's even neater like it's it's such a work.
00:06:09
Speaker
It takes a certain kind of creative genius and skill to take the real world and make it even more, I think, in a way, to really take flesh and blood characters and people and make them into flesh and blood characters. Yeah, I don't know. It's a cool one.
00:06:30
Speaker
Yeah. Well, the protagonist of this one, Engelhardt, is so, so eccentric that it feels like there's no way he could have been real. So why don't you tell us about him, Tom?
Engelhardt's Utopian Vision: Sun Worship and Coconuts
00:06:46
Speaker
Sure. Okay. So Imperium is following August Engelhardt, who is a
00:06:54
Speaker
In his 20s German man, this is taking place about 1910-ish. When we first meet him, he is on a steamer, making his way towards the German holdings in the South Seas in the South Pacific. Everyone else on board is in their white linens and trying to beat the heat that way.
00:07:19
Speaker
And he has a beard that goes down into his tunic. He's wearing a long white robe, sandals, long hair, and just sticks out like a sore thumb. It's quickly established that he is a vegetarian, which does not
00:07:38
Speaker
fit well into the society of his time, certainly the German society that he's leaving. And he's traveling to the South Pacific in the hopes of establishing a colony, establishing a place where folks can worship the sun. He is a nudist and also subsists entirely on coconuts. He has decided that the coconut
00:08:05
Speaker
He has a somewhat complicated philosophical theological system in which he feels that the consumption of vegetables, fruits and vegetables, is the natural way for humans to exist and that God is something more akin to vegetation than anything else. But humans are in God's image, but the coconut
00:08:30
Speaker
because it is closest to the shape of the human head is the closest to God as a result because it is also is now a fruit that is shaped like God and that it grows at the top of the coconut tree. And so is the closest to God's light. It is the ultimate thing that we should only and we should only exist on it. And he's really trying to or hoping I think to buy a coconut plantation in one of the
00:08:59
Speaker
far-flung islands in the Pacific and and kind of create a utopian community. Yes, I mean at the outset his goal is absolutely to to have this place set apart where like-minded folks can travel and join with him and together they can make this into a movement that would then spread across the world that this order of the Sun as he refers to it will by force of will and this comes up a few times in the novel
00:09:29
Speaker
by force of will and by force of argument will change mankind's destiny. And as the novel goes along, Engelhardt more and more starts to wonder whether or not he's actually begun to change the properties of his own body, whether or because he only exists on coconut, that he is himself becoming coconut, which I think gives you some idea of some of the directions that Engelhardt's life starts to go.
00:09:58
Speaker
So yeah, he makes his way eventually the island that he's that he purchases is part of what is now Papua New Guinea and has the island works with the folks who already live on the island and in many ways his outlook on the world is
00:10:17
Speaker
pretty at the outset, quite progressive for the time. He at one point is in Australia and prevents some folks there from beating to death a black man saying that no other human being should be treated like this. I mean, he's certainly a colonizer.
00:10:35
Speaker
There's no doubt of that, but he also views the other people as people. He may think that he wants to bring them into his order of the sun and to improve upon their lives, you know, not knowing anything about their lives, but he also isn't viewing them as something subhuman. So he does, at least at the outset, have that going for him.
00:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, and he also very much distains the prejudices and racism of his countrymen in Germany that are abusive and will become worse than that as the wars start to happen against the Jewish people. At least that's how he starts out. Absolutely.
00:11:23
Speaker
I mean, and cracked goes to some lengths to draw connections. I mean, as I said, the outset, this is also a bit of a novel of ideas and about modernity and about the fracturing. There's a really great line he has about the fracturing of reality that's taking place in this time.
00:11:43
Speaker
On page 45, 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 into 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.
00:12:13
Speaker
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 of celluloid. And then he goes on to say, 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-nostics denote as progress as well, civilization. So Engelhardt is not just trying to
00:12:38
Speaker
remake the world through the light of the coconut, as it were. He's also wholesale rejecting the society in which he has developed, which
00:12:49
Speaker
I don't know, it makes for an interesting foil, an interesting counterpoint as Cracked continues to bring in other viewpoints, force Engelhardt into interaction with that outer world. When he purchases the plantation, it is begun as a capitalist enterprise. That is what's going to power it forward. As it progresses, it becomes
00:13:11
Speaker
It becomes progressively more socialist or communist or whatever the phrasing that the various characters use to describe it is. It's more that he just does he can't make it work. So he stops paying his bills sort of deal.
Queen Emma's Island Business: A Savvy Transaction
00:13:23
Speaker
It's more by default that it goes in that direction. Yeah, it's it's a it's an interesting novel, not only because of like the gorgeous writing and
00:13:32
Speaker
you know, sort of the layers of an actual historical figure and, you know, the fictionalization of it and just the period in which it's being written, but also just how many different thoughts Cracked is throwing in here and blending into this tale. It's really quite impressive, I find.
00:13:53
Speaker
It totally. And Engelhardt, when he lands in what is now Papua New Guinea, he's certainly not the only or the first German person to, you know, have made landfall. There's already kind of a, I don't know, almost like a frontiers colonial type kind of setup on the island. You've got a governor.
00:14:19
Speaker
You've got a couple of churches, a couple of stores, of course, a drinking establishment. I think there's a whorehouse. You have this woman named Queen Emma who Engelhardt ultimately ends up buying his coconut plantation from. Do you want to talk about her a little bit?
00:14:44
Speaker
We see her she disappears for quite a while but then she comes back to us at the end of the book in a really kind of surprising way but she's kind of this we understand that she's attractive she's around fifty years old. And she's quite she's quite savvy.
00:15:02
Speaker
The governor sends Engelhardt to her when he knows that Engelhardt is interested in buying a coconut plantation, and she tells him about this coconut plantation that she has in the middle of the island, and it's huge. But then there's also this remote island, maybe a few miles off of the main island,
00:15:28
Speaker
where there's also a small grove of coconuts. She clearly wants him to have that one. She starts talking about how much easier it would be to transport the coconut oil and the other products that he's going to be harvesting than having to go through the interior of the main island to get his product out. She offers a price and he pretty much just swallows it and goes to live on the island then for, I don't know,
00:15:57
Speaker
two decades, maybe a long time. Yeah, she also. So her name is Emma for safe. She you'll be happy to know is also real. She existed. And it sounds like her life was even cooler than I mean, even more interesting and fascinating than what's even described in the novel, or at least equal to it. Did people call her Queen Emma?
00:16:20
Speaker
Yes, she was called Queen Emma. Awesome. So she's half Samoan, half American. She had a few different lovers and husbands in her lifetime. But over time, yeah, she was able to acquire through very savvy business dealings land.
00:16:36
Speaker
that she then rented out, sold on to other folks like Engelhardt. She also, in terms of her savvy, when she was describing the island on the interior, so she offered the island, the land in the interior and the island that Engelhardt ends up choosing, she offered them for the exact same price, even though the interior one was about 2100 acres and the island was about like
00:17:01
Speaker
what, a hundred, something like that. But she also made the point that the land in the interior is available because the previous owner covered the workers, his wife and children himself with pitch and set them all on fire, thus making it seem very unattractive to want to take over that location.
00:17:22
Speaker
Um, which is quite, quite bright of her. But yeah. And so she, she in some ways is this personage that is not, this is a German territory. This is part of the German empire. She is not German. Um, and she's existing somewhat apart from everyone else, both because of, you know, her, her family background and the fact that she's not a German citizen, but.
00:17:47
Speaker
She remains intrinsic to the community and incredibly powerful because of her business savvy and her dealings. At the end of the novel, we find out that she died in Monaco at the casinos. And that is also true. That is where she died. And her ashes were eventually returned to, I believe, to New Guinea, where they were spread.
00:18:09
Speaker
Well, it was interesting because she seems to be like the only person in this community or one of the only people that doesn't frequent the German cultural club where, for lack of probably a lot of entertainment options, that's kind of where the Germans kind of go and congregate and gossip and it's kind of like the
00:18:36
Speaker
the core of their social world and she, you're right, she just kind of sticks to herself and I don't know, I had a mental image of her just kind of being aloof and just like accumulating her wealth like over time, patiently.
00:18:55
Speaker
I get the sense that that's what she was and did. From the brief research I was able to do on some of the characters and some of the folks that appeared, she was at one point partnered with basically a pirate, for lack of a better word. He was engaged in running counterfeit goods. He may or may not have been engaged in kidnapping folks and then selling them on. I mean, the woman had quite
00:19:24
Speaker
quite the interesting. She made the most of living at the end of the 19th century, I would say, in terms of adventure and the like. Yeah, and living at the end of the world too. Yes, at the edges of everything and somehow still being even further apart from what was there in terms of a Western presence.
00:19:48
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, so the town that he initially lands in, where he meets Amba and purchases the island, and the island is just off, as you said, a couple miles off that island, is called Herbert Show. It's now called Kokopo. It was the regional hub for that part of the empire. And there's a really amazing moment about two thirds of the way through the novel. Not even two thirds, maybe halfway.
00:20:16
Speaker
where Engelhardt travels to Australia. Basically he's trying to, this is in the early stages of him getting, um, coconut oil production going on the island. And he's trying to find folks to like, he's trying to find vendors. He's trying to find people who will take on.
00:20:31
Speaker
his brand of coconut oil and while he's gone there is a decision that is made very quickly and executed very quickly to move the town to take down all the buildings and move them about 10 miles up the coast because the
00:20:48
Speaker
The bay that they're in isn't sufficient it's too shallow and there appears to be an underwater current that's pulling more and more sand into it and it's getting more expensive to dredge. So they're going to move to a better location. So they literally move the entire town like down to the nails and boards.
00:21:05
Speaker
to a new spot, recite everything as best they can. Although now the Chinatown district, you go up to it instead of down or something like that. There are missing trees and all that. And when Engelhardt comes back and he's had this very strange experience in Australia, when he comes back, he
00:21:24
Speaker
gets off the ship and he sees the town and he knows that it's there. Everything looks right, except everything looks completely wrong. There's something so brilliantly descriptive of colonialism, I think, in that moment.
Colonial Metaphors and Dislocation in Imperium
00:21:45
Speaker
how they can just pick up and move an entire town and dislocate everyone and disorient everyone involved. Even the people who took part in the process of moving it, they can feel that there's something just sort of off here, that there's some sort of intrusion taking place. It's one of the many very smart things that he does throughout the novel.
00:22:07
Speaker
Well, Engelhardt has a relatively rough, I would say, first several months on his coconut plantation in this remote island. He's bit by a bazillion mosquitoes. He can't stand the sand. The people that are resident on the island that, for lack of a better term, the local people, the natives, they're friendly to him. He offers them all jobs.
00:22:36
Speaker
And it seems that they're trying to help him and are amenable to working for him and picking coconuts. So all that's good, but even though he was already living a very ecstatic life in the old world, when he comes to this island and tries to kind of
00:23:01
Speaker
bring his trunk of books that he can never keep dry enough and just kind of live. He finds it quite challenging. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are elements to Engelhardt where he clearly is more of a loner
00:23:19
Speaker
He is an introvert, certainly, and he also does want to build a community, but he also clearly wants to sort of just be on his own, like, or at the very least, within the context of that community, he would like everyone to be just like him and be like minded the way that he's like minded, or like no, that's a poorly phrased phrase but he wants.
00:23:40
Speaker
If he is to have company, he needs them to be like him and in some ways, and as his time alone progresses and he becomes even more particular, he needs to be the one that's setting the rules, taking the lead on what they do, how they do it, and what the viewpoints are, which immediately brings him into conflict with the first person that arrives to join him.
00:24:04
Speaker
I'm going to make one attempt to say the gentleman's name, Aakens, A-U-E-C-K-E-N-S, and I apologize, but I do not speak German, and occasionally that's entirely too many vowels for me to pronounce properly.
00:24:20
Speaker
But young German man shows up, professes to be of the same viewpoints as far as vegetarianism, as far as sun worshiping, being in new discos, but also quickly demonstrates himself to be a rabid anti-Semite. And that is something that Engelhardt just has no interest in, views as disqualifying, even thinks that one of the people that the young man
00:24:47
Speaker
was working with, was talking to, was someone who Engelhardt was familiar with, and then remembered, oh yes, that man's a fierce anti-Semite, and that's why I don't much like him, and should have tipped me off a bit to who this person is. The young man also expresses viewpoints on free love, but more specifically, that he feels that homosexuality is the intrinsic state of humanity, which Engelhardt rejects.
00:25:14
Speaker
and is somewhat trying to ignore to a certain degree. But then the young man rapes McKelly, the young boy from the island that has been helping and working with Engelhard that Engelhard has been teaching German to.
00:25:29
Speaker
And about a day later, the young man, the way the scene is set is we just come across his body with his head burst open. And it's unclear if a coconut fell from the top of the tree and hit him, which can absolutely kill you. If McKelly killed him, or if Engelhardt, because of what had been done to McKelly, murdered him.
00:25:55
Speaker
I believe, if I remember correctly from what I was reading, this person lived and did die, and it was recorded that he died when a coconut fell from the top of the tree and killed him. But, you know, Cracked using this for his narrative and fictional purposes, you know, lays it out that it is entirely possible that this sun-worshipping nudist who thinks that being a vegetarian isn't even enough, that you can only eat coconuts who
00:26:24
Speaker
has a very hard time when he sees blood, may have bludgeoned another person to death. I love the fact that there was no inquest about this fellow German's death. And he was just kind of unceremoniously buried in the German cemetery on the main island without really any ceremony or anything like that. Was he also this Aachen guy? Was he also the guy that
00:26:54
Speaker
Felt like he in addition to coconuts see from time to time wanted a banana. Yeah, there's a lot of funny There's a lot of there's a lot of funny things in the book that that made me laugh out loud like that but also some peculiarities of Engelhardt and one of the ones that I loved the most was when he when he finds himself thinking of
00:27:18
Speaker
hard about something or deep in thought, he starts sucking his thumb. And he does this. He does this throughout the book. And I don't know, is this did you find anything factually about the thumb sucking Engelhardt?
00:27:34
Speaker
That I did not come across. But it's certainly used, though, and stated that it prefigures something potentially worse about Engelhardt as his thoughts progress. But on the point of the varying viewpoints on vegetarianism and what you can and can't eat, when Engelhardt's in Australia, he meets a young American named Halsey.
00:28:03
Speaker
who is a sympathy Adventist tried to get a job working with the Kellogg brothers like as in the
Debating Vegetarianism and Technological Progress
00:28:10
Speaker
Kellogg's corporation that still exists to this day, who were in the process of getting making cereal incredibly prominent throughout the United States.
00:28:21
Speaker
Halsey thinks that the Kelloggs are doing it wrong because, I'm just going to flip to it because of course the writer nails down the conversation even better, that cereals were by no means the right path to pure Adventist doctrine because ingesting them into the body necessitated the addition of cow's milk.
00:28:40
Speaker
No one wanted to eat dry cereal alone, but the milk that provided the lubricant, as it were, was obviously an animal product. Thus, they must see cereal production immediately and come up with something new that could teach the American consumer to be a vegetarian.
00:28:53
Speaker
Good Lord, off to Australia with him, the brothers thought. For they may have been pious adherents of their Adventist faith, but were simultaneously incorrigible, unalloyed Yankees, confident of business as a raisin dare." And so Halsey takes off to Australia. And when he meets Engelhardt, he's trying to come up with some sort of spread that would give you all the nutrition you need, but would be entirely made of vegetables. Like you would never have to come anywhere near an animal product in any way.
00:29:24
Speaker
They start this conversation and Engelhardt invites him to the islands to spend a few weeks trying out Engelhardt's lifestyle while pondering. Well, maybe this is a better way to do it. And on top of it, Halsey can't figure out a good name for it. He needs it to be a punchy, great name in order for this to really take off.
00:29:47
Speaker
When he invites the guy to the island, Halsey is disgusted at the idea of like being a nudist, only eating coconuts, that living in some sort of communal, communal whatever, that he is just as much a capitalist as the Kellogg brothers were. And so they get into this massive arguments over, basically over versions of vegetarianism, but then also how that vegetarianism is situated within their larger worldview.
00:30:16
Speaker
And then, of course, turns out that Halsey is the one that created Vegemite. So for anyone who's ever had Vegemite and hated it, this is the man to blame. I couldn't understand when I was reading that whole passage, like, where is peanut butter? Like Halsey, come on, like, you know.
00:30:31
Speaker
We've got something really yummy. It's called peanut butter already. That's, you know, totally plant-based. But anyway, there's another scene that's a little bit like that, really clever as well, where I think it's the governor is observing a hummingbird.
00:30:49
Speaker
And and talking about, you know, like, oh, well, wouldn't it be interesting to have a device where people could hover around things like the hummingbird does around the flowers and the pollen? But, you know, the hummingbird does this by consuming large quantities of nectar from the.
00:31:12
Speaker
from the flowers in order to have enough energy to hover like that. And then he says, you know, like, so obviously, if we were ever going to have something like that, you know, the means of energy for it would have to be within the
00:31:29
Speaker
in the machine itself. And it's just like, well, yeah, he's talking about a helicopter. I don't know. It was just, it reminded me very much of the Vegemite thing where it's like, you can see people's like, like the wheels of their heads, like clicking like, Oh, yeah, someone would should come up with something like that. And then, you know, of course, we now know that these, these machines and these products exist, but super clever.
00:31:56
Speaker
Well, it's also that this is such a, I mean, it certainly hasn't slowed down by any means. It never has been slow, but this is the effect of.
00:32:06
Speaker
you know, technology in some respects, interacting with civilization. And in this particular point in time, you have such the movement from, and we talked about this a little bit in Job's grief, this movement from like a much more primarily agrarian society into an urban one, which then forces new needs and new ideas to really take root.
00:32:28
Speaker
And sometimes the counterpoint to that is something like spiritualism that sprung up or certain kinds of religious revivals. But it's also things like, I don't know, an order of the sun where civilization seems to be so dreary and so terrible.
00:32:45
Speaker
I mean, the one time or the one time that's relayed in the book that Engelhardt goes to Berlin is under a heat dome that is causing people to like knock over the ice cream trucks. And that's been a top of the conversation of late with Arizona, I think is still under a heat dome. Chicago was choking on the wildfire fumes from Canada, not
00:33:10
Speaker
not too many weeks ago, that kind of would make you think that maybe you need to get away and reduce things and simplify and maybe find a better way to live. At the same time, on the governor, Hall's view on this is to think of new things, new things that will make life more interesting or more possible or more engaging in some way. Hall's a fun character.
00:33:35
Speaker
Yeah, I really liked him. He is funny. He's definitely someone who's just in it for himself. His morality is a bit questionable, right? Flexible. As we'll get into in a little bit.
00:33:55
Speaker
But he is a really interesting guy, a guy that you feel like he's been around the block. He knows how to maneuver himself and maneuver people in his colony to fulfill what he thinks, what he wants done, what he thinks needs done. And he's also very willing to be a little dishonest and cut corners.
00:34:19
Speaker
I want to, if you'll indulge me, get back to Engelhardt's thumb sucking because putting his fingers in his mouth and his thumb in particular is kind of part and parcel a bit, I think, of another
00:34:35
Speaker
habit that Inglehart has and while you can say that he only eats coconuts, he also has this disgusting habit of eating his own finger and toenails.
Engelhardt's Eccentricity and Decline
00:34:50
Speaker
And I think he justifies that because, you know, like, oh, well, this is just part of my own body. So I'm not ingesting anything from the outside other than coconuts. I'm just kind of replenishing my protein by eating my own fingernails. It made me laugh as so many parts of this book did. But what do you make of that?
00:35:19
Speaker
It ties into a couple other things that we haven't quite talked about yet as well. One is that he also does drink a weird like slurry of dirt and water. Apparently it was originally soil from Germany and then it's whatever soil you can find, but the idea is that that's going to replenish his minerals.
00:35:37
Speaker
And the real Engelhardt had a number of people in the vegetarian community that fundamentally disagreed with his viewpoint, one of whom made the argument and shows up a bunch, that said that he failed because he didn't have a good transitional diet, that he went too hard in one direction, and that
00:36:00
Speaker
Frankly, one source of nutrients was never going to work, that sort of thing. And clearly he's supplementing with dirt, apparently, and eventually himself. But I think that also ties in a bit to his musings about whether or not he himself is evolving into something new by his consumption of coconuts. That if at this point he is more coconut, a more comprised of coconut than a person, when eating your fingernails, then just simply be eating more coconut.
00:36:30
Speaker
But then on top of that, in his journey from Germany to the island he ends up on, obviously he has to travel quite a ways, but he does make a stop in India. And while in India, he starts, he's engaged in conversation by a man named Govinda Rajan.
00:36:57
Speaker
who professes himself to be a vegetarian and eventually turns out to be a scam artist and and rips him off, steals a bunch of money from him. But in this in this really like powerful to Engelhardt conversation where this person is like responding positively to all of Engelhardt's beliefs that
00:37:17
Speaker
And elaborating upon them and this is this is the younger Engelhardt who seems much more willing to have conversation about all this isn't. Hasn't malnourished himself to the point where and and other issues where he can't possibly take on you know new viewpoints.
00:37:36
Speaker
One of the things that Govinda Rajan says to him is elaborating on the idea of the coconut as being the head of God. Well, if you're eating the coconut, aren't you then a theophage? Aren't you then a devourer of God? And this idea clearly takes root in Engelhardt's mind, like just sort of slowly working its way into all of his other beliefs and thought processes.
00:38:06
Speaker
It may not even be cannibal as a form of cannibalism, the sucking of his thumb, the eating of his fingernails. It may simply be a form of worship at that point if he himself is becoming akin, akin to some sort of a Godhood God status.
00:38:21
Speaker
Yeah. And we see that character, the Indian man comes back onto the island where Inglehart is living. It's a different island where he set up shop with someone else. You're right.
00:38:37
Speaker
So Engelhardt actually, this is the last time that Engelhardt leaves his island is to travel to, because from a letter from a friend, there is another German on another island that is doing something similar to Engelhardt. So he goes to try and find out what it is. And what he finds out is, of course, disturbing and hysterical all at the same time, I think.
00:39:19
Speaker
Time is very fuzzy, and it's deliberately so. Like, Engelhardt is clearly really not marking the passage of time other than maybe a bit at the outset when he and the folks on the island are producing materials for sale, specifically coconut oil. He would go to shore every couple of months to pay his workers debts, and that's part of the way that they're being paid their wages.
00:39:44
Speaker
But that starts to trail off. But so this is probably within the first year or two years of him being on his island. And he hears that there's someone else doing something just like he is. But that person seems to be drawing people to him. And so he travels there. And this is maybe it was this trip that he took where he comes back and the town has moved.
00:40:04
Speaker
again, time's very fuzzy in this novel, but when he gets there, there's an entire community of younger people who are worshipping this man who is claiming to be able to live on light. He's eating the light and it's tied into this idea, this
00:40:26
Speaker
Hindu idea prana and it's clearly just a whole jammed up thing and when the guy steps out from his hut and proceeds to deduce what is described as improvised yoga poses and snap at the light like he's a cod um angle heart angle heart is immediately pissed and because the guy also
00:40:50
Speaker
looks robust, looks healthy. And Engelhardt even before he got to the island was scrawny and a bit more than a bit way fish from how he ate and drank and just conducted like it's just his lifestyle.
00:41:05
Speaker
And so once the guy goes back into his hut and all these young people are watching and explain to him what they're trying to learn and how this person clearly has ascended to a new level, he storms up to the hut and rips the rug covering the opening to one side and finds that it's a German man and an Indian man quickly standing up and trying to hide the fact that they've been chowing down on chicken.
00:41:34
Speaker
and the Indian man turns out to be Govinda Rajan.
00:41:43
Speaker
The German man is like, I didn't mean for it to be this way. I wasn't trying to con anyone, but I had this idea and I was going to try it. And then people showed up and they started getting me gifts. And then by the time I realized this has gone too far, it had gone too far and everyone's getting me gifts, so I have to maintain it. And it's a con. It's just a complete con to enrich themselves. Instead of somewhat of an epilogue of the novel, we find out that they continue to do this all over the Pacific.
00:42:11
Speaker
before they're eventually caught and arrested. Yeah, but Engelhardt isn't even going to expose him. What he first wants to know is, is this real? He finds out it's not real and is like, well, you're clearly too weak because I only live on coconuts. And then like, you know, turns on his heel and sweeps out of the room. Though while he's there,
00:42:35
Speaker
And it's been mentioned a few times that he's, you know, got some scabs. He also likes to eat his scabs, which is... And other people's scabs. And other people's scabs. It's gross. But Gavinder Rajan notices some of the open wounds on Engelhardt's legs and immediately clocks that and even says to his partner in crime that we don't really need to worry about this guy for much longer. He's got a problem that he doesn't even realize he has, which eventually you find out.
00:43:05
Speaker
It's his leprosy. We don't know exactly where he caught it. But there's there's a pretty good description of how he probably caught it. There's a piano is introduced. We'll get to that because this is one of my very favorite besides Engelhardt. One of my favorite characters in the novel is the musician Ludlow. But
00:43:28
Speaker
Yeah, a musician comes, a German musician comes to the island and at Engelhardt's behest brings a piano and there happens to be a native man that's very interested in learning how to play the piano who has leprosy and one of his scabs comes off like from his fingers on the piano and then
00:43:52
Speaker
Engelhardt, the, the cocoa vore decides to eat that man's scab on the keyboard. Yeah.
00:44:00
Speaker
I don't think we've used that term enough, Coco War, and that's what he describes himself as. And I also meant to mention this a little bit ago, but we have our second character that we, I mean, that's named, that has the name Angel built in. We had Angel in My Heart Hemmed In. Well, Engelhardt translates to Brave Angel.
00:44:22
Speaker
So we have August brave angel who is the coca-vore and attempting to turn himself into God via eating the head of God the coconut wild I want to talk to you if I can about two kind of
00:44:37
Speaker
a broader thematic things. One is that I thought it was really quite interesting in this book that, you know, so many things that you read about fictional or non-fiction about people trying to create a utopia or a utopian society. There's some kind of spiritual or religious kind of aspect to it. And I kind of felt through all of this book, perhaps, maybe there's some exceptions that you'll tell me about, but
00:45:06
Speaker
that Engelhardt like really doesn't isn't interested in certainly not in having like the the Christian god brought into this the utopian society nor even you know it's like some of the the eastern gods like the um like the Hindu or or Buddhist or anything he's just kind of trying to create this
00:45:31
Speaker
almost good people just based on the fact that they will be morally upright just by eating nothing but coconuts. Am I right on that? I mean, to a certain degree, but there is a spiritual element to what Engelhardt is trying to do. I mean, he does refer, I mean,
00:45:54
Speaker
I don't think he's talking purely in metaphor when he says that the coconut is growing closest to God. The sense of God almost feels more like a spirit of humanity, spirit of the age, sort of feeling Gaia, as it were, maybe as a comparison, though I don't think that would be quite the right
00:46:18
Speaker
That would line up exactly. There is a spiritual element to it, but it seems to be much more, as you were saying, living in harmony with nature the way that we're supposed to live, which obviously has some very built-in prescriptive decisions around it. This is how you're supposed to be versus living well by other people, treating other people well, and living within society.
00:46:45
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think his viewpoint and his, his spiritual direction is really quite muddled. He feels, you could almost call him a do your own research guy. Like it feels like this is the sort of thing that he's read about. He's decided that this is the right way to live. And so he's going to write about it and everyone he's going to, he, he gives out pamphlets like crazy. He gets beat up on a few occasions back in Germany because he pisses off the authorities with, with his viewpoints.
00:47:16
Speaker
If he lived today, he would have, you know, during lockdowns probably been writing about how, you know, whatever particular horse tranquilizer was perfect for killing off COVID. I think he's that kind of person.
00:47:31
Speaker
Well, and he did write a book before he moved to the island. And that book kind of, after he's been on the island a while, kind of brings him some unwanted fame. But the other kind of thematic thing that I wanted to talk to you about is that
00:47:49
Speaker
There's a lot of art infused in this book. Engelhardt's quite a cultural man. He's an educated man. He reads German books to the native boy. He knows German composers and he knows German art.
00:48:12
Speaker
There is a point in time, probably about two-thirds of the way through the book, where he comes to this, I don't know if it's an epiphany or what, that he says, you know, well, maybe my life is actually a work of art. Maybe that's the real art, is not these artistic compositions that other people have created, but basically
00:48:39
Speaker
the way that I'm living my life and I wanted to get your opinions on that and whether that's just him like drinking his own Kool-Aid or how that kind of reverberates through the rest of the novel. Yeah, I flagged that moment too. Suddenly the thought occurred to him that possibly he himself was his own artistic artifact and that perhaps the paintings and sculptures exhibited in museums or the performances of famous operas
00:49:06
Speaker
And is that precipitate
00:49:26
Speaker
what becomes, you know, his fall, basically, like things start going really haywire with his coconut production and and just his sanity and his reputation over in the main island with the with the German colony. Do you think that's kind of a turning point?
00:49:50
Speaker
probably. I think Krak does a really great job, and I think this is one of the ways that he realizes the character so well, of laying out a point like this, but then very frequently
00:50:03
Speaker
I don't think he does it in exactly this moment, but he very frequently goes, but this is not the only thing that contributed to it. He's trying to create the whole nexus of events and pressures and circumstances that have the outcome of Engelhardt losing his mind and going from eating his fingernails to eating something more than that. But I think it's also, I mean, this is where I think some of the things that he's doing with the other characters like Governor Hall,
00:50:32
Speaker
are also reflected a bit where you have a
00:50:37
Speaker
a location and a time, and not even just the location, just a time when there are so many countervailing forces at play and so many paths open to people. You can be the governor of the German Empire in the South Pacific and also be reading every tract that is being published back in Berlin and theorizing about engineering,
00:51:05
Speaker
engineering something that is, you know, sustaining but can hover like a hummingbird. I mean, I think it's sort of a, for lack of a better word phrase, like a wild west of ideas in times. And this is how it's being expressed in this one person in Engelhardt. But he puts himself into an even more extreme situation by really just cutting himself off from other people. And
00:51:33
Speaker
malnourishing himself, like very deliberately malnourishing himself. But in terms of a serious turning point in where he's going, I mean, it probably is. And actually glancing at the page again, it continues with, he smiled again, dispatching this delectable, still-upsistic fancy into a secret and remote corner of his edifice of ideas, set up and opened a coconut while inspecting the wounds in his legs, which oozing had grown ever larger in recent weeks.
00:52:01
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, I think you're right. I mean, I think this thought occurs to him. He goes, ah, that's funny and puts it away, but it's there and it's taking root and it's changing. It's just if an idea like that would definitely find fertile soil in someone like Engelhardt's mind. Yeah.
00:52:20
Speaker
Well, maybe we can talk about my second favorite character, Ludlow, a bit. And I'm hoping that you will tell me from your research how Mr. Ludlow ultimately dies because it's quite spectacular in the novel. And I can't imagine it really went down like that in real life.
00:52:43
Speaker
No, he did not die that way. I didn't think he had. He got sick and died. You should tell this one. It's incredible. Well, I will, but I think some background about Ludlow's time on the island with Engelhardt
Island Life: Ludlow's Experience and Fallout
00:52:59
Speaker
first. He's there for a year before they have a falling out and he leaves.
00:53:08
Speaker
He's a musician, you know, I feel like fairly well known in Germany. He comes to Papua New Guinea and of course on the main island, the colony there, he has to play at the hateful German culture club and he really despises hanging out with all of these people who, you know, try to put on airs and try to act sophisticated even in this remote island.
00:53:34
Speaker
in the middle of the Pacific. He then goes out with the piano that Engelhardt has asked for, and I think he goes ostensibly to tune the piano because he can't stand an untuned piano. I think there's a line that I really liked. It was like, for Ludlow, an untuned instrument was like being a painter and not having the use of reds or blues.
00:54:01
Speaker
So it was, it's, he kind of, you know, spends some time on the island, gets the piano in as well enough shape as it can be in this kind of human environment, and kind of befriends Engelhardt and decides to also become a coco vor. And they live in pretty good harmony for quite some time. He
00:54:28
Speaker
Ludlow loves hanging out with the natives. As I mentioned before, there's a local, I think he's a chief of the tribe, that is just mesmerized by the piano music and really just wants to learn how to play and even builds his own kind of makeshift piano out of plants and tries to emulate the sounds that Ludlow makes.
00:54:54
Speaker
But then there seems to be just a, um, I don't know if it's because they're both like malnourished and they're kind of at Tether's end, but they have a pretty extraordinary fight. Tom, do you remember what some of the circumstances are around why they fight?
00:55:16
Speaker
The falling out is the seed of it sort of is formed when they are called in by so.
00:55:25
Speaker
Lulu arrives and they start writing letters back to Germany talking about this island and this way of life and how incredible it is because he fled Germany and he was a composer, he had his own orchestra because he kept getting sick but everyone kept telling him you're not sick. He even goes to see Freud and Freud turns him out.
00:55:48
Speaker
And so he's basically fleeing the world and he's trying to find somewhere where he can live and be aware. He feels that Berlin is too provincial, that everything is crushing in on him. So he gets to the island and he feels amazing and everything's better. And I don't know.
00:56:04
Speaker
clean air would probably do you a lot of good coming from early 20th century Berlin. Sunshine. Sunshine, fresh food, all good. So he gets there and they start earning these letters. And Engelhardt had also written letters and was trying to build his community. That was his goal at the outset, but no one was publishing them. No one was really listening.
00:56:27
Speaker
But this composer has something else going for him. He's actually an established person and respected. Now, some of the newspapers published the letters, but with the header of, oh, this famous composer has now gone and joined up with a madman on an island and is walking around naked. But here's his letter anyways. And so it drew people in.
00:56:50
Speaker
all of a sudden folks saw younger folks who were trying to flee from similar things who already had the idea of vegetarianism or nudism or coca-vourism, I can't believe I just said that, in their heads start flocking there, but they get stuck in the regional capital. And so the governor calls them in because it's really creating a problem of these bearded, half naked or fully naked Germans wandering around town, barely eating anything,
00:57:20
Speaker
Um, they don't have any money to pay for mosquito nets. So they're all getting sick. The first one that arrives there dies. And so the, the governor hauls them in to basically be like, we need to figure out a way for this to stop. Like I need you guys to stop writing these letters. We need to find a way to deal with these people and.
00:57:38
Speaker
Lilla puts forward an argument for what they are doing and what the island is. Yeah, what their lifestyle is supposed to be about and how it's communal and how it's all these things. And he starts listing them off, rattling them off. And Engelhardt immediately is uncomfortable, more than uncomfortable. He does not know who this man is, who thinks he can speak for
00:58:02
Speaker
his order for his way of life. So I'll pause you there for a minute, if I may. So yeah, there's an interesting conversation that they have with Governor Hall about what to do with these. I think that says like that's 25 people that have, you know,
00:58:21
Speaker
come to shore from Germany and are not at all equipped to deal with life in a colony in the middle of nowhere and are sick and the governor has moved them to one of the two hotels in the colony and
00:58:39
Speaker
Although I think that you're right that Engelhardt does not like the fact that maybe Ludlow is talking about what the purpose is of their project or what they're trying to do. He doesn't like that Ludlow is kind of taking the reins. There also seems to be some...
00:59:01
Speaker
some resentment by Engelhardt that Ludlow is bringing in all of these socialists and philosophers and trying to kind of make Engelhardt's coca-vore utopia into something that approximates somebody else's idea and that makes him very angry as well.
00:59:29
Speaker
Lula brings up a couple of people that Engelhardt describes as an anti-Semite. Another one was an expression of a shabby, Philistine utopia of the petty bourgeois governed to top it all off by an obsessive sex drive. So, I mean, he takes serious shots at what his friend is saying, and Lula immediately goes quiet. And Hall recognizes that there's something happening between these two men in this moment.
00:59:56
Speaker
They resolved to like, I mean, Engelhardt takes out further debt or, you know, puts forward more money on future earnings on his coconut oil in order to pay for all these people to be sent back home and they'll stop. So I mean, Engelhardt's initial idea of creating a community, he had an opportunity of sorts to have one there and he runs away from it. Like he takes it steps to prevent it from taking place.
01:00:20
Speaker
But from there, it seems that the relationship just deteriorates. In particular, there are a pair of scissors that Engelhardt uses to clip his nails, and they go missing. And it's stated at one point that
01:00:37
Speaker
I mean, Engelhardt actually briefly considers killing his friend, but, um, it stated that, um, McKelly swipes them, makes them go missing. And he might be doing this every so often. And it leads to Engelhardt accusing Ludlow of stealing the scissors, which Ludlow was like, I, I didn't steal your scissors. I don't know why we're having an argument about this. And it just gets more and more heated with Ludlow finally being like, look, if you don't want me here anymore, I don't need to be here.
01:01:06
Speaker
And Engelhardt's like, great, you should go then. And he leaves. And it then is said that Mikelle thinks to himself that it had taken him a year of work to get rid of this new intruder. So clearly, there are other forces and other people working on this island. They're a part of the community that Engelhardt probably wouldn't recognize as part of his community that are exerting some control over him, which is interesting.
01:01:34
Speaker
Yeah, and then the novel. I'm interested in why you think. A crock did this, the author, but he pretty much tells us in the narrative, OK, now things are going to like go really fast, you know, and it's you know, we're now like 30 pages from the end of the book and and they really do. I mean, suddenly like this is happening, this is happening, that's happening. And why do you think
01:02:03
Speaker
Why do you think that he made that decision? Why not just like make this a 300 page book and just kind of let it play out on its own good time, whether that then have this like really abrupt kind of.
Conclusion: Fates and Cinematic Discoveries
01:02:18
Speaker
Condention of like all of these wrapping up almost like the end of a of a film with the credits like, OK, this is what this is what ended up happening with this guy. And this is what ended up happening with this guy.
01:02:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of crazy how many characters are introduced and are amazing characters in the last. I mean, so that argument and all and him leaving the island takes place on page 138 and the book ends on page 179. Like you're like, literally, you're right. It's like 40 pages and we're done.
01:02:50
Speaker
I think it's, I mean, I think it's two things, actually, I think it's because World War One is about to break out. And that changes everything. It changes who's in control of the territory. I think it when I was mentioning like all the different pathways open to people earlier, I think a lot of those start to close down after World War One and World War Two, like I think there is a
01:03:11
Speaker
a thrust to history from here. I think in some ways that's what Cracked is talking about as well. I mean, the book opens talking about how this is the era at the beginning of the century in which Germany will take its place in control of the world functionally. Germans at the global zenith of their influence, which is about to come crashing down.
01:03:34
Speaker
and change and Germany is about to take a very dark turn or the next while. And so I think it's partially because in the general timeline, World War I is about to happen and that changes ability for someone like Engelhardt to the figure that he represents, the moment in time that he is a part of is coming to a close. So now we're going to move into the next part.
01:03:56
Speaker
I also think it's because there is a cinematic quality to how he writes, and this is the part of the movie where the action kicks in. I mean, the climax of the novel in some ways is the composer leaving the island. From here, we're just tying up loose ends, introducing a lot of new material, but also tying up some loose ends, expanding the scope so as to also to simultaneously narrow it.
01:04:23
Speaker
Yeah, we see the return of a character named Slooter, and I don't know whether we want to give away how this novel ends, Tom. No, I mean, I don't think we have to go into a full blow-by-blow, also, because I think it's really fun. I mean, the whole novel is amazing. This is the part that, in some ways, is fun.
01:04:42
Speaker
this is the this is the action part of the novel and it delivers it is it is it is fast paced it is exciting it is terrifying at times he he unlike he just delivers on every possible emotional register it's really really cool so let's just say like world war one happens the island like that territory is taken over um by
01:05:06
Speaker
The Australians was part of the British Empire. And in the real world, in our world, Engelhardt lives till about 1919 and then is found dead on the island. In the novel, he pretty much disappears. The Australians show up on the island. They offer him six pounds as recompense for taking it from him. He throws it at their feet and he walks into the jungle and they don't follow him. And Engelhardt disappears.
01:05:30
Speaker
And then we hear how everyone else lives and dies. We will touch on what happens to Ludlow. And actually, let's just do that right now. So when Ludlow leaves, he goes back to the regional Herbertstra. Herbertstra. And he basically meets Emma. She reappears. And they almost don't even speak to each other. There's just this immediate connection.
01:05:56
Speaker
He pulls her to him, they kiss, they have sex, and they immediately get, like, they get married within two weeks. They have sex on the beach, like, immediately. Which you have to think there's probably people watching, and in fact, Governor Hall, the next morning, you know, knows all about it. And it turns out that Governor Hall has, for a long time, had a crush on Queen Emma. So he's not so happy about the fact that
01:06:25
Speaker
Ludlow and Queen Emma now are wanting to get married, and they ask that the governor marry them, and he makes up some kind of lame excuse that he can't, and he says, well, you should go down to the docks, because Slooter's here, and his boat is docked, and he's down there, and a ship's captain can definitely marry you.
01:06:51
Speaker
And so that's what they do. They get married by Slooter, who is a character that we see early on in the book, who then comes back and plays even a bigger role than marrying these two. But he does marry them. And you think that maybe they're going to live happily ever after, but they don't, at least in the novel.
01:07:11
Speaker
No, um, so everyone's drinking on the boat and, uh, being convivial and the main ships that bring supplies. Um, I think it's like the, the Prince of Valdemir or something like that.
01:07:23
Speaker
I think it's the male ship. Yeah, it's pulling into the harbor. And the composer gets it in his head to like try and like jump to the ship in celebration or something along those lines. And so he runs up and his foot slips while he's holding a glass of champagne in either end. And at that moment, the male ship is getting a little too close. And he falls in between the two ships and he gets slammed between them, his entire body. He is completely
01:07:51
Speaker
crushed like between these two ships destroyed and it's shocking it's
01:07:58
Speaker
What the hell? It's horrible and funny at the same time. Yes, I mean, it's, it's, it's wild. It's, it's a very wild way for, I mean, and in some respects, it kind of draws the main action of the novel to an end. I mean, after that, we pretty much just get a, some quick hit, some more people come through the, the German, what German presence there is there becomes even more, you know,
01:08:25
Speaker
taking a harder turn towards the right, towards the Nazis. Yeah, more and more real historical figures start to appear and did visit the island. But there's a way in which this is almost the end of the book, I would say, with his death. I mean, the rest of it very much feels more like epilogue than everything else.
01:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, and in this quick fire kind of way that we are wrapping up, kind of like, and here's what happened to this character. You know, there's not a lot of
01:09:00
Speaker
of space or, or I don't know how to quite say it, but you really don't feel much emotion for what's happening. It's almost like, wow, this is crazy. And then you hear about what happened to the next person. So when I say it's funny, it might sound like very unfeeling, but I feel like there's not a lot on the page that makes you think that you should be feeling something for the way poor Ludwig died other than kind of like incredulous.
01:09:28
Speaker
Absolutely. And also, there's the description of how Emma, I mean, Emma poise on the Jeddah, that's the name of sleutorship, in a yellowed wedding dress, not only witnesses the incident, but more or less has it imprinted in slow motion onto her retina, image by tumbling image. She sinks down on one knee in shock, as if in a sudden prayer.
01:09:49
Speaker
everything has happened so horribly fast. But again, that whole cinematic quality, this would be the scene in the movie where you see him fall, but you're seeing him fall against the image of her eyes and being reflected there. And he's bringing that into it. And I think this acceleration, again, it's not just the World War I, it's the World War I, but it's the cinematic quality to it. But it's just how fast everything changes from here on out.
01:10:16
Speaker
And I mean, we're coming, I think we're coming very much to the end of our conversation on it. I did want to point out that Engelhardt very much loses it and starts digging up traps all over the island because he thinks people are going to come for him. And at this point, he is, he is self cannibalizing. I mean, he is eating himself. This is what he feels he's been driven to.
01:10:38
Speaker
More than just his fingernails and turnails. He's like cutting off his thumb and eating. Yeah. Cough his thumb and index finger. I mean, he's he's mutilating himself and then consuming his own body parts. And there's a scene where Slooter is on the island with him as he's breaking. But at that same moment, McKelly leaves the island.
01:10:58
Speaker
I think it's either, I think he's a slooter, even at one point looks at Mikelle and thinks to himself how German the boy looks, how he holds himself and how his English and his German and just how he interacts, he presents as a German, despite looking nothing like what the slooter would consider a German to look like.
01:11:19
Speaker
Michelli leaves. Michelli at this point cries as he does so, but realizes that his time on the island is at an end. And I think there's something, I don't know, I haven't really thought about it long enough, I don't think, but there's something really interesting that Krakt is doing with Michelli throughout this. Like how much he's interwoven into Engelhardt's life, even though he doesn't
01:11:41
Speaker
appear that consistently, how much of the action that takes place within this community or this aborted, I think you use the word project, within this aborted project is driven by McKelly and in some ways how Engelhardt finds like the most solace in his time on the island, educating and reading to McKelly.
01:12:03
Speaker
I feel like there's something going on there around colonialism. I think there's something going on there around failed utopias and what they bring. And also just something about youth moving on. But I haven't quite, I kind of wanted to highlight it because I think that it's definitely an important theme and an important thread of the novel. But it's just not one I've quite nailed down in my own head yet, I don't think.
01:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good point. I don't recall McKelly ever saying a word in the book. No, I mean, he doesn't seem to. I mean, it's suggested that he speaks to Engelhardt, but we never there's never any direct address to anyone else that we hear about, even when even when those spending a year on the island, his interaction with Kelly seems, you know, nominal at best. But all the same, I don't feel like McKelly is without
01:12:56
Speaker
agency in some ways because he definitely is quietly working to get all of these men, other than Engelhardt, who were told that as soon as Engelhardt comes to the island,
01:13:14
Speaker
right there and never leaves his side the whole time. So I don't know whether McKelly is feeling threatened by these men or, you know, just wants to have his hero to himself, but he doesn't
01:13:29
Speaker
Yeah, we don't really know what McKelly's thinking or what's in his head, but also I was just thinking it would be so when you were describing him that it would be so interesting to have a sequel to this novel and be all about McKelly.
01:13:47
Speaker
Sorry, it's set up that way. Like we do get we do get a quick scene in the Kelly and he basically paddles away with another character. We're not going to go into too much. But another young person that is sort of paddle away and maybe they make it to Australia. Maybe they go somewhere else. But there's like, everyone else there's a very firm ending to there is not a firm ending to, to Mikelle in the same way.
01:14:11
Speaker
No, and you almost think that maybe that's the hopeful thread of the book in the end, that maybe these two young people after the wars are going to be able to make a go of it together. They're also the two blending of cultures. I mean, she is British, but also this is the young woman that goes away with McKelly.
01:14:32
Speaker
Um, Pandora, um, which is great there in his Pandora. Um, but she's, she's British, but she also, um, has just been, um, tattooed by Mari. Um, she clearly is like pulling, she's pulling in this whole, the whole culture of, uh, of the, of the area. McKelly is from there, but has been given a German education, speaks English. I mean, they are there and, you know,
01:15:00
Speaker
Maybe I'm getting too hopeful, but maybe that's the hopeful idea of this sort of cultural integration, that there's something new that can come out of it. I think to end it, end it, and end it with the idea of the cinema. And I can cut this part if you think we shouldn't give it away. But Engelhardt in real life dies in 1919. In the novel, he is found on the island in World War II.
01:15:26
Speaker
He's still alive. He's missing both his thumbs. His leprosy has somehow been cured. He is found by the U.S. Navy. They start to question him, and because he's talking to people for the first time, his German comes back, and then his English comes back, and he starts telling this story. And again, in this rapid fire manner,
01:15:46
Speaker
the officer interviewing him goes, man, what a tale. We tell Hollywood hears about you. And the last freaking paragraph of the novel, it describes the director sitting in the front row at the premiere and just describes how this tale is going to be shown on the screens and move through. And this vision of this silver age of Hollywood after World War II, it's wild, Laurie. It's such a wild way to end the novel.
01:16:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it really is. And I think that in some ways it ties back to this what is art, what is life kind of thing, which makes me even more ashamed of the fact that I didn't know that this was based on a truth story. Well, I read this book
01:16:37
Speaker
I don't know what, four years ago? I didn't find that out until just this past week, Lori, so do not, you're ahead of it, you're ahead of the curve on me, that's for sure. Yeah, but I mean, it just is, is so, is so crazy. But, but yeah, I do think that this,
01:16:53
Speaker
this, what we called the epiphany for Engelhardt about, you know, maybe, maybe the way that I'm living my life, being this Coco voor utopian is the real art, you know, and then just thinking about creating, creating a work of cinematic art out of this, out of this crazy story that we just, we just read. It's,
01:17:19
Speaker
This is just a wonderful novel and I know that I'm going to be reading it again recommending it to people it's. Thank you for this great discovery Tom it's it's fantastic well I'm so pleased you like it and yes it is it's a phenomenal novel it is one that I think.
01:17:37
Speaker
Anyone who's listening to this podcast would absolutely devour and love and there's one other work of cracks that's been translated into English. He's been translating to seemingly every other language on the planet, but only two of his novels are in English. We really want more and more and more.
01:17:59
Speaker
Yeah, definitely, definitely enjoy the ones that definitely grab these two. The other one's called The Dead. And I don't think you'll be disappointed at all. Guarantee it.