By Joshua Rothman
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.”
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