leifalreadyexists 's review for:

Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas by

3.0

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Angular and acrid, like a permanent bad taste in the narrative voice is just aching to be unleashed. As far as the colonial absurd goes, this is a good representative of the genre. There's also great mileage of of vaguely hilarious concepts: cocovore doesn't sound so irrelevant to our own time, actually. The setting too is great, an underused, frequently forgotten corner of the southwest Pacific that the Germans lost in the first world war. I could never quite shake the wet mockery of the voice, however, with its coiled, serpentine clauses and whiplike digressions.