This long-steeped book distills their conversations into a potent, vaporous fever dream; a meditation on truth, lie, illusion and time that floats like an aromatic haze through Herzog’s vivid reconstruction of Onoda’s war ... Herzog presents a kind of dual libretto to the operas both men conducted in their different jungles. They worked on different continents, in different eras and to different ends, but they served the same inexorable impulse: to lead a life of archetype in the modern day, outside of time, eternal.
In making Onoda the subject of his first novel—a slender chronicle rendered in efficient, idiosyncratic English prose by the poet and translator Michael Hofmann—Herzog declines to treat him as a joke. He is clearly fascinated by the absurdity of this hero’s situation, and also determined to defend the dignity of a man who had no choice but to persevere in an impossible mission ... The Twilight World emphasizes the existential dimensions of Onoda’s strange, looping odyssey in language that often veers from the concrete data of jungle sounds and smells into dizzying abstraction ... Herzog is not interested in psychological or historical realism, or for that matter in literal facts, but in 'ecstatic truth' ... The Twilight World strikes me as too flimsy, too elliptical to count as essential Herzog, but it did send me back to his films with a renewed appreciation of what they put at stake and why they matter ... The affinity between Herzog and Onoda is evident on every page of The Twilight World, though to identify the author with his subject too closely would be a mistake. Herzog’s sympathy for his errant heroes is always evident, but so is the detachment required to represent them honestly, to find the truth that they themselves might be too absorbed in their own circumstances to see.
... a brief, thoughtful narrative that dwells largely on the mechanisms of Onoda’s fortitude. It also occasionally detours into more poetic, sweeping passages in which Herzog rides his protagonist’s ever-spinning mind to muse on grand concepts like loyalty, time and self ... Herzog’s seasoned eye for a well-framed shot also translates seamlessly to the page as he invokes the perils of a relentless jungle that eventually becomes akin to a fog ... As profound and thought-provoking as the best of his films, Herzog’s The Twilight World delivers as a superb yet painful parable on the fleeting nature of purpose.
... spare and lyric ... Beautifully translated from German into English by Michael Hofmann, The Twilight World reveals the companionship of soldiers with nature and each other but concludes without examining the collective damage wrought by their imperialist fantasy. Mimicking nesting dolls with an architecture of time from 1997 to 1974 to 1944, where it lingers before boomeranging back, the novel’s construction could have made it possible to see into and around Onoda more ... In his feverish search for ecstatic truths, Herzog has given readers a portal into human folly, self-discipline and domination — surely his life’s work.
Nature's brutality, the immensity of time, dreams: these are Herzog's eternal fascinations, and he locates them all in Onoda's story ... This blurring of documentary and fictional storytelling will be familiar to fans of the author's films, as will the mesmerizing, otherworldly tone with which he achieves his effect.
... it is not clear exactly why the director chose to tell his story in the form of a novel, which often reads like a voice-over in a Herzog film ... It turns out that The Twilight World is another platform for Herzog to explore the themes that have defined a body of work that stretches back to the late 1960s: man against nature, the thin line between dreams and reality, the tireless search for meaning in a meaningless world. That it is a novel doesn’t really distinguish it from his previous work, in which documentary subjects speak in long, staged paragraphs while actors must perform the impossible feats that their crazy characters are attempting. The book’s epigraph could stand as a summation of Herzog’s tendency to dissolve the difference between reality and fiction ... What makes The Twilight World unique is Onoda himself, since his mad exertions arose from the very specific historical context of Japanese militarism. Onoda was not a creative visionary who wanted to build an opera house in the Amazon. Nor was he an endearing kook who believed he had a special relationship with Alaska’s brown bears. He was one of millions of Japanese citizens who were indoctrinated in a cult of emperor worship and merrily went to war under that banner. That Herzog doesn’t quite grasp this distinction, that he sees Onoda as just one in a pantheon of Sisyphean figures waging private struggles in the face of the eternal jungle, reveals the limitations not only of his first novel but of his other work as well ... Coming near the end of Herzog’s slim novel, it is a rare indication that this character has any interiority at all. Herzog’s gaze, like a camera’s, can only capture surfaces ... The story of Hiroo Onoda shows how Herzog’s fascination with dreams can veer into Freudian nonsense—a reluctance to attribute people’s behavior to very obvious real-world causes, preferring instead to dwell on the mazy mysteries of the mind. The Twilight World also calls into question Herzog’s predilection for seeing all of humanity through the prism of the individual fighting the elements. Yes, in each person there is a light that is eternal and universal. But while individuals are remarkable creatures, people can be quite awful.
... wondrous ... Few writers are better equipped to capture a place so overwhelmingly opaque that it lapses into absurdity, and a life that became an exercise in purposed purposelessness. In Herzog’s hands, Lubang exists outside of time, and Onoda’s war has the eerie gravity of a thought experiment come to life ... Herzog has always been attuned to the ways in which survivalism functions as a form of existentialism. The brutal irony of The Twilight World comes in moments like these, when Onoda succumbs to what a psychologist might call patternicity. He finds meaning everywhere, hearing signals that soon fade into the endless noise ... a funny novel in the same way that Herzog’s film Grizzly Man—about an environmentalist who loved bears, and was eaten by them—is a funny movie. To call it dark, dry, or deadpan is an understatement; it’s more like cosmic farce, or field recordings of the hiccups of fate. The novel’s most humorous events are also its most despairing ... he approaches the task of novel writing with more caution and, somehow, more abandon. He seems to write with an Onoda-like sense of obligation, and, indeed, he has said that he felt fiction was the only appropriate form for telling Onoda’s story ... slow and spectral ... a true story unpredictably enriched with fiction, it seems to shimmer with layers of meaning.
... resonant ... Framed and staged with all Mr. Herzog’s image-driven flair ... benefits from a translation by the reliably excellent Michael Hofmann that does pinpoint justice to both its dreamlike and documentary sides ... alternates between rare spurts of action and the sultry stasis of the tropical forest ... this camera-like objectivity lets us register the patriotic narcissism that helps Onoda withstand his 'shapeless time of noctambulism' ... After this clear-sighted fable, the signature fog that often swirls through Mr. Herzog’s shots descends on his thoughts, and on his prose.
Elegant in its brevity, The Twilight World (through Michael Hoffman’s translation) makes cogent Onoda’s story, offering a rendering that accords in most particulars with the chronology Onoda establishes in his memoir. Both understand his experience as one 'outside the flow of time,' as Onoda writes. And both create memorable images of warfare by evoking, for instance, the bluish shine of bullets at night ... Given that The Twilight World adopts as much as alters Onoda’s retelling of events, however, Herzog’s refusal to recognize the 1974 publication seems ungenerous. That said, the atmospheres the two books create and the ideas they develop are radically distinct. Onoda’s story is a guide thronged with facts about the making of tools and the mending of clothing, complete with meticulous line drawings. The Twilight World is a reverie less focused on delineating action than on rendering impressions ... By unspooling Onoda’s figure at this gravid pace, Herzog gestures adeptly toward his character’s tensely executed but excruciatingly patient maneuvers in a world dense with plants and buzzing with insect life. Drawing out the scene, the writer transforms action into an opportunity for reflection ... At its best, the book moves with a dreaminess that does not sacrifice the satisfactions of concrete image ... there is at times a thinness to the prose. Where the book’s language becomes abstract, its central character’s strange existence diffuses into a mist that renders him insubstantial. In Herzog’s films, this ghostly quality works in startling and memorable counterpoint to sumptuous cinematography and soundtracks that distill and clarify so skillfully that the experience of watching and listening becomes almost tactile. But however philosophical they are, novels satisfy in part by illuminating the feeling lives of their characters. In the end, it’s hard work to elucidate ideas without leaching fiction of its sustaining immediacy.
Herzog sidelines moral issues – Onoda terrorised Lubang’s residents and killed several during his extended warfare. Instead, he tries to inhabit Onoda’s mind. The result is a visionary narrative ... This is Herzog’s debut novel – and it is beautifully crafted, a literary jewel set to sparkle against the backdrop of his monumental career in cinema.
At its best, Herzog’s writing bristles with the same eerie and uncompromising energy as his films. His jungle pulses with hallucinatory life ... For Herzog, language is a bridge between the earthly and the cosmic. In his quest for the visionary, though, he sometimes oversaturates his sentences ... In the context of the book’s narration these eccentricities – rendered with brio by translator Michael Hofmann – don’t feel like flaws. Instead, like the voiceovers Herzog provides for his documentaries, they lend the project an infectious, freewheeling swagger. But there is a cost. The more life Herzog gives the jungle, the more Onoda seems camouflaged by the foliage around him ... That inner tempest speaks to Onoda’s essence. Herzog, though, is deaf to it...Herzog is observing, not inhabiting. The extra interior dimension the novel form invites, and which in the right hands it excels at making visible, is closed to him. This may be merely a technical issue – perhaps, in picking up his pen, Herzog can’t entirely put down his camera. But given that Herzog is a white European man writing his way into Japanese culture, one does also wonder if a more profound failure of the imagination is to blame ... Why not give space to this encounter? Why not show us that common ground? The answer, I suspect, lies in the very terrain Herzog feels he and Onoda share: the jungle. This is where the true 'essence' that captivates Herzog resides. He finds it not in Onoda, but through him. Of course we can’t see Onoda: Herzog has made him his lens.
From the true story of a WWII soldier who kept up the fight until 1974, legendary filmmaker Herzog distills a brooding, poetic novella ... Herzog, ever in pursuit of deeper truths, sees in Onoda’s predicament an all-too-ordinary tendency to subordinate facts to master narratives ... Perhaps we prefer the jungle, Herzog suggests, if the alternative is facing reality.
Through spare language and minimal detail that recall Herzog’s screenwriting technique, together with great leaps through time, the novel spans the full 29 years of Onoda’s remarkable story while keeping the focus on him ... A brief but powerful and noteworthy addition to the résumé of a master storyteller; fans of Herzog’s films will see the filmmaker’s cinematic fingerprints all over this absurdist, if absorbing, story.
Herzog 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.
Stunning tale of obsession unto madness by a master of that narrow but fruitful genre ... Herzog fans will hope for a film to come. Meanwhile, this evocation of loyalty to a lost cause serves beautifully.
Fascinating ... Onoda’s reemergence into a changed world in 1975 adds a captivating layer, though it’s all too brief and lightly sketched. Still, Onoda shares with the director’s filmic protagonists a fierce will and singular perspective. This will whet the reader’s appetite for a film version.
... sparse and only lightly fictionalized ... canters along smoothly enough. Much of it is laconic and somehow wilfully prosaic, assuming something close to Onoda’s soldierly viewpoint without presuming to get too deeply inside his head. This is effective – we are trusted to find the subject as interesting as Herzog does – and seems decent. Then there are occasional dithyrambs on the theme of nature’s chaotic sublimity, which are harder to take: 'Crickets scream at the cosmos' and so forth. These seem more about maintaining the Werner Herzog brand than about the intrinsic needs of the book ... Onoda certainly makes a good Herzogian protagonist, even if a heart attack at the age of ninety-one isn’t exactly a Herzogian end. As to whether there is more to his story than just another man in uniform who carried on doing what he should have known was wrong because he was only obeying orders – that may be a question for others to decide.
Stretches of The Twilight World read like a screenplay or documentary outline that’s been injected with prose fiction growth hormones. In the expository and digressive passages, it’s impossible not to hear Herzog’s famous voice ringing charismatically in the inner ear ... If a less celebrated figure than Herzog presented their editor with a book this slight, they’d probably be sent back to their desk to imagine their way deeper into the psychic jungle, fleshing it out with a few more chapters. Which is to say: we’re here for the writer as much as for the story ... The start is shaky – if they ever award a prize for ropiest opening lines, my money is on Herzog ... Happily, this hallucinatory nonsense is a false alarm: the prose soon settles into a less hysterical descriptiveness, with only the odd surreal apocalyptic flourish. The author wisely trusts in the story he’s telling – and with one this good, he can well afford to move out of the way ... In its brevity, The Twilight World is sometimes as superficial as a Wikipedia entry – whole decades are skimmed over in a line or two – and at times frustratingly withholding ... provokes – and thwarts – an appetite to know more. Nearing his 80th birthday, Herzog gives off the megalomaniacal vibe of one who won’t let old age slow him down, perhaps won’t even notice that it’s happening.
It’s a potent metaphor that goes beyond an external mass delusion that may resonate in any era, and particularly in one where truth has become a subjective construct. Yet there’s destructiveness here that’s more than simply the delusion of one flawed human being. There’s the power of the (metaphorical and literal) jungle to destroy everything, and this seems to tug at Herzog’s very life’s work ... One can’t fault Herzog’s vivid prose ... It’s beautiful prose, sure, but such breathlessness, which on film might have translated to a series of indelible images, can feel corny on the page. And, at least as translated by Michael Hoffman, sometimes sound like self-parody ... Over the course of a sweeping novel of the jungle, or a harrowing film, The Twilight World’s imagery might gain the necessary power, but over a sparse 144 pages, one hardly gets the sense of futility that comes from Onoda’s 29 years spent in exile, in vain. At his best, Herzog the director has taken us to impossible places, and left us feeling we have travelled a long distance. So it’s too bad that his first novel feels like it’s just scratching the surface of a much deeper fount.
... intriguing but flawed ... The island’s mass of flora is invoked to oppressive effect. Density and humidity are captured with sharp brevity ... Herzog’s talent, on the page as on the screen, is in recognising the everyday in extreme situations, how the extraordinary becomes ordinary ... Yet this view of Onoda as a castaway is problematic. In reality, following Japan’s surrender, he went from being a soldier to a terrorist. Philippine forces were killed and local farms plundered during his campaign. Herzog chooses to avoid this issue in favour of mythologising. He also fails to differentiate between his protagonist’s sense of duty and what could be considered a form of mania ... A larger problem is that the novel, like its protagonist, is stuck in the jungle. To engage with the enormity of Onoda’s experience, the reader needs to understand the character of the young man who went into the undergrowth — his childhood hopes and family life — and his emotions during the years following his return to civilisation in 1974. Before his death in 2014, aged 91, Onoda married, farmed cattle and opened a youth camp. Sadly, Herzog spends little time on these essential bookends. As a result, deliberately perhaps, Onoda remains an enigma.
