MixedThe NationHerzog has chosen a subject so tailor-made for him that it verges on self-parody ... We can regret that Herzog has not (yet) made Onoda’s story into the feature film for which The Twilight World at times feels like a treatment—or, better, the documentary that its narrative frame suggests it could have been ... Questions that might preoccupy another writer—above all, what disposed the thoroughly ordinary Onoda, in his prior life a minor colonial opportunist, to such extraordinary fanaticism (a question that only partly answers itself)—are dismissed as inconsequential. Explaining, for Herzog, would amount to explaining away ... For Herzog, this is only to be expected; to fault The Twilight World, as some have done, for failing to provide a sociological account of Onoda’s mania is, in essence, to fault it for being a work by Herzog. Magical thinking and ritual actions are constants in his work. The repeated template of the Herzog film presents an act of faith that ends in failure, yet a failure that renders the act more grand by making it autonomous: one that doesn’t depend for its meaning on any external effect. Onoda fits the type only too perfectly. His concrete assignments—to destroy the pier at Tilik and the airstrip at Looc—both fail. But this merely sets the stage for a drama of persistence and renunciation that blends self-abasement with megalomania ... Such interpretive ingenuity can yield moments of sublime bathos ... In general, though, the ironies here (as so often with this artist of grand gestures) tend to be a bit on the nose ... The existential comedy of this encounter with brute, stupid reality, which the men put through the mill of the local logic and massive illogic of their futile campaign, is a reminder of everything The Twilight World shares with Herzog’s greatest films. By standing out so sharply against its background, it also measures how far this slight prose work falls short of them ... At its best, Herzog’s writing in The Twilight World approaches a fable-like simplicity, with a gentleness that is almost painful. What is missing is any sense of risk. Nothing here feels wrung from him ... The book’s hints at some greater intensity mainly serve as reminders of what was more compellingly expressed elsewhere.
Lawrence Joseph
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe local and intimate find their place on a global scale that the writing strives to bring close ... Not the first poet to meditate on political economy and empire, Joseph is distinguished by his knowledge, which is not merely technical...his poetry favors blunt words and has an ear for meaty talk ... No less than John Ashbery’s, Joseph’s poems soak up and savor common phrases ... And they have talk’s way of skating on thinnest ice: More than one poem ends up in a drastically different place from where it began, abrupt shifts testing the pressure talk can sustain ... The technique envisions strong sensations converging with moral judgment. Knowing how the poor can brutalize the somewhat less poor, and are brutalized by the powerful, Joseph knows, too, the fog-effect of official language and tries — not always successfully — to pierce it ... A poetry of force, and of statement, but somehow not always of forceful statement, Joseph’s is one in which verbal extravagance serves a distinctive kind of reverie. Walking or driving, mind and senses keyed up to highest pitch amid his wasted and opulent cities, he lets present and past wash over him ... He is one who derives equal power from looking into violence’s face and turning toward the beautiful as a compensatory violence of vivid sensations in which he rests his moral hope. Unafraid to push language to its breaking point in tautology, A Certain Clarity is a major work of American art that lives up to its early promise.
