There were many books I read this year and expected to love—Elena Ferrante’s “The Days of Abandonment,” Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle: Book Three”—and I read them and loved them, as expected. But “Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed” took me by surprise. It’s a six-hundred-page book of interviews with the German director, in which decades’ worth of conversations have been edited down into a dozen seamless exchanges. Herzog’s interlocutor, the film scholar Paul Cronin, asks innocuous questions (“Could any of your films be categorised as ethnography or anthropology?”), and Herzog replies by telling incredible stories from his life in filmmaking. He talks, for example, about a near-death experience in a snow cave on Cerro Torre, about a plane crash narrowly avoided in Peru, about forging the documents that allowed him to make “Fitzcarraldo.” The stories are riveting—often, it seems as though Herzog is trying to top himself—and, if you want, you can try out his Bavarian accent as you read. The book is full of useful advice about the creative life; it has a self-help quality. “May I propose a Herzog dictum?” he asks at one point. “Those who read own the world. Those who watch television lose it.”
The book’s weaknesses parallel Herzog’s. The interviews feel deeply staged (they were edited by Herzog after the fact), and many of the stories are rehearsed: they’ve been told before, in other places. As a thinker, too, Herzog has few hidden recesses. Reading these interviews, you’ll learn almost nothing about his outlook that you couldn’t learn from watching “Grizzly Man” (or from reading Daniel Zalewski’s 2006 Profile of Herzog, in this magazine). Cronin’s title, “A Guide for the Perplexed,” is ironic: “Why should we be perplexed?” Iain Sinclair asked earlier this month, in the Times Literary Supplement. “Nothing could be simpler. No filmmaker is more direct in his address to the audience.” In short, there’s a sense in which the book is boring. Like Herzog’s films, it combines extremity with implacability. Herzog’s sensibility is less like a river, with tangled eddies and tributaries, and more like a wave, powerful because of its simplicity, unity, and scale.
In fact, I suspect that it’s this unreflective simplicity that allowed the book to make such an impression on me this fall. I bought the Kindle edition and read it on my phone, on the subway and at lunch, in the course of a few months. Herzog has little interest in the real world, or at least in the real world in which I live. To him, the life of a journalist who resides in the city and writes about books, who commutes by train to an office and lifts weights at a gym, who talks about politics and watches “The Good Wife,” who eats at a “small plates” restaurant on Saturday night and reads, on Sunday, about someone else’s Sunday routine, is not so much absurd as illusory. “We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution,” Herzog says. Later: “What I’m looking for is an unspoilt, humane spot for man to exist, an area worthy of human beings where a dignified life can be led.” And: “In ancient Greek the word ‘chaos’ means ‘gaping void’ or ‘yawning emptiness.’ The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema . . . . I wouldn’t hesitate for a second if given the chance to venture out with a camera to another planet in our solar system, even if it were a one-way ticket.”
It’s quite something to hear this voice as part of your daily routine. Even if Herzog’s dreams aren’t your dreams, they serve as spurs for dreaming. And rebelling. My favorite moment in the book sees Herzog at a film festival, on a panel discussion with several documentary filmmakers. The other directors are devotees of cinéma vérité; Herzog is a fabulist, famous for inserting made-up facts and scenes into his documentaries at every turn. Herzog: “I say here to adherents of cinéma-vérité: I am no bookkeeper; my mandate is poetry.”
Herzog probably doesn’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I know what mine will be.
