Every man for himself and God against all A memoir

Review by Booklist Review

Like his films (Fitzcarraldo, say, or Aguirre, the Wrath of God), Herzog's memoir is a decidedly nontraditional piece of storytelling. It's a collection of memories, each told as a self-contained story, with no connecting material to thread them together. Here's Herzog describing how he grew up in extreme poverty. Here he is telling us how a childhood desire to fly led him, years later, to make his 1974 documentary about a famous ski jumper. Here's how he got cast in the Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian. The book is written in a literary voice that is outspoken and conversational, and it is peppered with eccentric details such as "My knowledge of milking came in handy many years later with the astronauts who made up the crew of one of the Space Shuttles." (The translation by Hofmann, who has also translated books by Wim Wenders and Franz Kafka, is delightful.) A fascinating portrait of an inventive and idiosyncratic filmmaker.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The idiosyncrasies of filmmaker Herzog (The Twilight World) are on full display in his eccentric if unreflective memoir. Herzog was born in Munich in 1942 and soon moved with his mother and brother to a farm in the remote town of Sachrang to escape Allied bombings. As a young teen, he returned to Munich and, convinced after a spiritual experience while working on a fishing boat that he wouldn't live past 18 (he writes of the episode that he was "bedded in a cosmos without compare, above, below, all around a speechless silence"), began making films because he assumed "they would be all that was left of me" after his premature demise. He explains that he learned almost "all there is to know" about moviemaking from "the thirty or forty pages on radio, film, and TV in an encyclopedia" and expounds on the making of his most famous films, revealing that Jack Nicholson turned down the lead in Fitzcarraldo because he "only took parts that left him free to watch Los Angeles Lakers' games." The prose is often beautiful and there's no shortage of prime Herzog-isms ("I always wanted to direct a Hamlet and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers"), but the director offers disappointingly little in the way of emotional introspection. Still, Herzog's fans will want to check this out. (Oct.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Herzog in all his extravagant, perspicacious glory. Now 80, the acclaimed director, documentarian, and author, a "product of my mistakes and misjudgments," recalls his "archaic," poverty-stricken early years in the Bavarian Alps on the edge of a war before digressing into the making of The Wild Blue Yonder, "a completely fantastical science fiction film." Throughout, Herzog is witty and captivating as he recollects all kinds of odd, curious, and outlandish events, people, and injuries--maybe, he speculates, some memories aren't real. Discussing ski jumping as a boy, he shifts to a film he made about it. When the family moved to Munich, the author met the maniacal Klaus Kinski, who would appear in his films. "I knew what I was letting myself in for," he writes. Herzog's brief time at university was a "sham"; he was already making films. "Even physically, I was hardly ever there; there were entire semesters when I showed up once, maybe twice," he writes. The author became a Catholic as a teenager, and while he later left the faith, he admits to a "distant echo of divinity" in some films. "There are various recurring tropes in my films," he notes, "that are almost always derived from personal experience." Past and present mix as Herzog rambles widely from job to job, country to country, memory to memory. He chronicles how he learned from others' bad films, scrambled to raise money for projects, and acted in other people's films, and he touches on the genesis of his own. The atmosphere in Aguirre, the Wrath of God was "dire," and Herzog swapped his "good shoes for a bathtub full of fish" to feed his starving crew. During the filming of Fitzcarraldo, almost everything went wrong. "I don't see the things that fascinate me as esoteric," he writes near the conclusion of the book, which ends midsentence. Fans and neophytes alike will relish the opportunity to delve deeply into Herzog's fascinating mind. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 Stars, the Sea The lamentations ended about noon. Some of the women had screamed and torn their hair. When they were gone, I went to see for myself. It was a small stone building by the cemetery in the hamlet called Hora Sfakion on the south coast of Crete, just a few houses scattered over the steep cliffs. I was sixteen. The tiny chapel had an opening, no door. In the half-dark within, I saw two corpses so close to each other, they were touching. They were both men. Later I was told that they had killed each other in the night; in that remote, archaic part of the world, they still had the vendetta, or blood vengeance. All I remember now is the face of the man on the right. It was lavender blue with splotches of yellow. Emerging from the nostrils were two enormous pads of cotton wool soaked full of blood. He had been hit in the chest with a load of buckshot. At nightfall, I went out to sea. I was working for a few nights on a fishing boat; it would have to have been on the few dark nights either side of the new moon. One boat towed six skiffs called lampades out to sea, each one of them with one man on board. There we were all dropped a couple of hundred yards apart and left to drift. The sea was as glossy smooth as silk, no waves. An immense silence. Each skiff had a big carbide lamp that was shining down into the deep. The lamp attracted the fish, especially cuttlefish. There was a strange method of fishing for them. At the end of a fishing line was a small shiny piece of wax paper about the size and shape of a cigarette. That attracted the cuttlefish, which grasped the booty in their tentacles. To help them hold on, the bait had a wire wreath fixed to it. You had to know just exactly how far down the lure was below the surface because the instant the cuttlefish felt themselves being pulled up into the air, they would straightaway relinquish their booty and drop back into the water. You had to accelerate the last arm's length of line so that you were able to swing the cuttlefish onto your skiff. The first few hours were spent in silent waiting until eventually the artificial moon of the lamp began to take effect. Above me was the orb of the cosmos, stars that I felt I could reach up and grab; everything was rocking me in an infinite cradle. And below me, lit up brightly by the carbide lamp, was the depth of the ocean, as though the dome of the firmament formed a sphere with it. Instead of stars, there were lots of flashing silvery fish. Bedded in a cosmos without compare, above, below, all around, a speechless silence, I found myself in a stunned surprise. I was certain that there and then I knew all there was to know. My fate had been revealed to me. And I knew that after one such night, it would be impossible for me to ever get any older. I was completely convinced I would never see my eighteenth birthday because, lit up by such grace as I now was, there could never be anything like ordinary time for me again. Excerpted from Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir by Werner Herzog All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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