Werner Herzog might be the perfect guide, although not the most reassuring one ... The reader who perseveres to his final pages is rewarded with the deflating conclusion 'The truth has no future' ... His croc in a cave made me think of Plato’s conundrum about shadows dancing on a cave wall, how hard they are to interpret, and whether we’ve made much progress at all in separating reality from illusion.
Pretty cool ... A hyperlinked hodgepodge of fixations, vivid memoir, and Wikipedia-esque snapshots ... With an all-consuming grandiosity befitting an Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo, he reckons with a world in which accepted truths are no longer sacrosanct ... Moments like this, told with an absurd, Germanic detachment and inscrutability, are a regular feature in Herzog’s writing ... Yet his prescriptions to save us from a potential post-truth world fall a bit flat.
The beauty is filthy and raw but in Herzog’s lens somehow all the more beautiful for that ... What makes The Future of Truth hard to cubicle is that when you’re dealing with Herzog you’re dealing with an artist with boundless curiosity for the exigent, almost the curiosity of a child ... If there is any living artist who overwhelmingly deserves to be dubbed a genius, that living artist is Werner Herzog, and The Future of Truth is yet more proof.
Like the strange, enchanting films for which he is best known, Herzog’s seventh book defies the usual conventions of structure, narrative arc and the delineation of fact from fiction ... Contains strong, gnomic opinions ... It’s like listening to a fireside monologue from an entertaining uncle ... However, because this book is a collection of uniquely Herzogian mindfarts, it resists a panning ... Michael Hofmann’s sparkling and inventive translation from the original German...somehow makes Herzog more Herzog in tone ... I can’t quite decide if it is absurd, profound or an ecstatically truthful mix of the two.
An erudite plea to not give up on truth ... Little is original here, but Herzog is an engaging ally, and he isn’t above cheekily harmless deceptions of his own.
Scattershot ... Herzog’s musings on these points amount to a familiar and somewhat fuzzy defense of poetic license, though fans will relish his evocative prose and riffs on instances of confusion between reality and fantasy ... It’s a mixed bag.
