November 21, 2022
A man lives on top of marble cliffs where he distracts himself with collecting plants in this elliptical allegory of tyranny from Jünger (Storm of Steel). The unnamed narrator moved to the safe haven with his brother, Otho; his son, Elio; and his mother-in-law, Lampusa. The men, veterans of an earlier war, now live peacefully as botanists, hunting for plants in the forests and registering their findings in their catalog. But not even this idyllic lifestyle can protect them from the Head Forester, a malicious figure with a taste for brutality and a disdain for art, whose fame precedes and empowers him (“Just as in the mountains thick fog heralds the storm, a cloud of fear preceded the Head Forester”). Some kind of war is brewing, and after a man arrives with a young prince, the narrator reluctantly joins their fight against the Head Forester in what turns out to be a complex, multisided conflict. An appealing introduction from Jessi Jezewska Stevens offers two credible and conflicting interpretations (either it’s an anti-fascist anthem or a “retreat into aesthetics”), but while Jünger (1895–1998) beautifully portrays the narrator’s nostalgia for a simpler life, readers will likely feel unmoored by the hazy details of what’s going on. Fans of European classics will want to take a look at this curiosity.
February 1, 2023
First published in Germany on the eve of World War II, this haunting elegiac fable about the fragility of civilization gets a powerful and timely new translation by Tess Lewis. In a vaguely European monastic retreat, veterans of an ignominious war reverently study nature and observe ancient ways, humbly drawing "ever nearer the mysteries hidden in the dust." From their aerie, they observe with mounting alarm the rise of the Head Forester, a charismatic figure of "reckless arrogance" and "terrifying joviality" to whom the masses flock "the way snakes are drawn to an open fire." As time-honored traditions and taboos give way to strange new gods, "dreadful icons" devoted to a rude sense of justice and equality "centered solely on vengeance," the anchorites' quietism offers no recourse but flight. VERDICT More than a mere roman � clef about Hitler or Stalin (or both), J�nger's vivid and evocative narrative transcends its moment in capturing the ageless struggle between our individuality and creative wonder, and the darkness and terror sure to follow when people abandon themselves to belief, even if only to a belief in nothing.
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July 14, 2023
In her excellent introduction, Stevens (The Exhibition of Persephone Q, 2020) writes that J�nger, who died at 102 in 1998, is "by far the most interesting [writer] to have ever emerged from the interwar right." J�nger was a highly-decorated soldier, and his first book, Storm of Steel, first published in 1918, is a classic WWI memoir. Marble Cliffs, which can be read as an allegory of the rise of fascism, came out in 1939, and only because Hitler, who was a Storm of Steel fan, directly interfered to prevent the Nazis from suppressing its publication. Two brothers, retired soldiers and amateur botanists, live on an idealized Mediterranean coast, in a hermitage above towns and vineyards. Inland are primeval forests, home to dark forces at odds with the culture of the coast. The brothers participate in a clash of civilizations wherein one ancient, elemental worldview incinerates the other. What makes this book an enduring work and not just a timely (or untimely) meditation, is its atmosphere. The prose is like amber, holding so many vivid details intact. Blanchot's ""Afterword,"" composed in 1942, the year the Nazis finally suppressed the book, is astonishing, and J�nger's, from some 30 years later, recounts his experiences writing the book and its reception.
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