Fiction chronicle May 2023
On maneuvers
A review of On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger, translated by Tess Lewis, Fulgentius by César Aira, translated by Chris Andrews, Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore & The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis.
Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), the German writer, war hero, man of the Right, and sphinx, claimed that On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen, 1939) came to him in a dream.1 It may have. Jünger was a devotee and a hoarder of dreams, and this story reads as if it were one of them. Now available in a new, and significantly improved, translation for New York Review Books Classics by Tess Lewis, the book is a tale of mounting horror, in which its two principal protagonists (the unnamed narrator and his brother, Otho, are proxies for Jünger and his younger brother, Friedrich Georg) are participants and yet, in a sense, spectators, as in a dream: “While evil spread across the land like fungus on a rotten log, we...
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