Introduction
The Gravity's Rainbow Support Group (GRSG) began in June 2020 as a "reading group" of two people. It was a support mechanism to plow though Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (a book you should never try to read alone) during the pandemic. The GRSG took some of the difficulty out of reading this challenging book and provided a way to keep two now-retired college chums (from Indiana University) Francis Walker of Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Murray Browne of Decatur, Georgia in touch. Basically, we decided to keep this good thing going. Undaunted we take comfort in the quote by Alfred Whitehead, written in 1955:
A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.
This page is the sixth installment of our reading-discussion notes of books we assigned ourselves in 2025. Our reading notes include favorite quotes and passages and some of our discussion about the book. Don't expect coherent prose or well thought out arguments, but our musings may provide insights to your own understanding and enjoyment of these books. We finish each posting with one of Francis's sterling Amazon reviews.
Here are the lists of books read and discussed in previous years:
2020 Reading Notes Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon; The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker; Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
2021 Reading Notes The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust; Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner; Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 by Barbara W. Tuchman; Cultural Amnesia by Clive James; The Periodic Table by Primo Levi; The Historian’s Craft by Marc Bloch; An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky; Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight The Odyssey and Illiad by Eva Brann; Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
2022 Reading Notes The Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra; Mountains and a Shore: A Journey Through Southern Turkey by Michael Pereira; The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy Gentleman by Laurence Sterne; Grant by Ron Chernow; The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain; The U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money); Under the Net by Muriel Spark; Two Wheels Good: The History and the Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen; Red and Black: A Chronicle of 1830 by Stendhal.
2023 Reading Notes A Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe by Robert Maraniss; Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths; Force: What It Means to Push and Pull Slip and Grip Start and Stop by Henry Petroski; On Bullshit (2005) by Henry G. Frankfurt; Dubliners by James Joyce; TransAtlantic by Colum McCann; Regeneration by Pat Barker; Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy by Colin Dickey; The First World War by John Keegan; Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Galileo and the Science Deniers by Mario Livio.
2024 Reading Notes Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell; An Honorable Exit by Éric Vuillard; Poor Things by Alasdair Gray; I Never Did Like Politics: How Fiorello La Guardia Became America's Mayor and Why He Still Matters by Terry Golway; Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner; Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh; The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger; From Empire to Revolution: Sir James Wright and the Price of Loyalty in Georgia by Greg Brooking; Hunger by Knut Hamsun; The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives by Adam Smyth; The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara Tuchman; Death Glitch: How Techno-Solution Fails Us in This Life and Beyond by Tamara Kneese.
And now we move on to 2025:
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
Written near the end of his life Herman Melville’s (1819-1891) Billy Budd was subjected to various minor revisions posthumously. Although Melville is now considered part of the canon of 19th century American novelists with his leviathan Moby Dick Melville’s influence had sunk into oblivion until 1925 when D.H. Lawrence revived it.
On occasion the GRSG has included some of the classics —The Odyssey and Tristam Shandy, and Frankenstein in its reading repertoire. Why we selected Melville in this instance remains a mystery, but we did temper our commitment by selecting the novella.
Plot
Billy Budd, aka The Handsome Sailor is “a fine specimen of the genus homo who in the nude might have posed for a statue of young Adam before the fall” writes Melville (Chapter 18). He is in his early 20s, illiterate, naïve, and ignorant. He has a stutter which flares up when he becomes anxious. Often he attempts to hide his speech impediment by remaining silent in key moments. He is popular among his shipmates, except the insidious Master-of Arms-Claggart, whose is described as having “a conscience as being but the lawyer to his will, made ogres of trifles. ( Melville echoes a theme of German Philosopher Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933) who says that the mind waits hand and foot on the will). Claggart is envious of Billy (for some reason he didn’t like the cut of Billy’s jib) and falsely accuses him of mutiny. (Since the book is set around the Nore Mutiny of 1797, the British Admiralty is very sensitive about mutinies). After a brief naval engagement with a French frigate, Billy is brought before the educated, respectable Captain Vere, where Claggart accuses the unsuspecting Billy of treason. Provoked, the Handsome Sailor lashes out and punches the Master-of-Arms hard enough to kill him.
Making a short story shorter – Billy is found guilty of murder by a trio of ship officers and is hung at dawn the next morning.
End of story? Hardly, there’s much more to it.
The Writing
Reading Billy Budd, it understandable why Melville was considered a master of the 19th century fiction. The descriptions and thoughts of the main characters and an account of life in the British navy, which was the lifeblood of the empire, are impressive.
Here Melville describes the common seafaring man of the day:
“Their honesty prescribes to them directness, sometimes far-reaching like that of a migratory fowl that in its flight never heeds when it crosses a frontier.” (Ch. 8)
Melville reinforces the somewhat larger truth about those with careers in the military – they are really taught not to think for themselves but to follow orders. He writes
“Every sailor, too, is accustomed to obey orders without debating them; his life afloat is externally ruled for him; he is not brought into that promiscuous commerce with mankind where unobstructed free agency on equal terms- equal superficially, at least- soon teaches one that unless upon occasion he exercise a distrust keen in proportion to the fairness of the appearance, some foul turn may be served him.” (Ch. 17)
Trial
Billy’s hearing is brief but loaded with meaning. First it is presided over by Captain Vere who was an eyewitness to the crime. Vere is portrayed as a fair-minded well-read commander. This description by Melville reminded us that Captain Vere’s taste in books is similar to those books selected by the GRSG.
“With nothing of that literary taste which less heeds the thing conveyed than the vehicle, his bias was toward those books to which every serious mind of superior order occupying any active post of authority in the world naturally inclines; books treating of actual men and events no matter of what era- history, biography and unconventional writers, who, free from cant and convention, like Montaigne, honestly and in the spirit of common sense philosophize upon realities.” (Ch. 7)
Although Captain Vere knew as an eyewitness that Billy’s attack on Claggart was more of an unfortunate accident than something premediated, he recused himself from the hearing. But once the verdict was reached, he justified the death sentence because he was worried that the sailors under his command would think him weak, if he didn’t remain firm in the punishment for mutineers.
Earlier in the book (Ch. 11) Melville suggests that instead of just using legal and medical experts to try someone for insanity:
Why not subpoena as well the clerical proficient? Their vocation bringing them into peculiar contact with so many human beings, and sometimes in their least guarded hour, in interviews very much more confidential than those of physician and patient; this would seem to qualify them to know something about those intricacies involved in the question of moral responsibility; whether in a given case, say, the crime proceeded from mania in the brain or rabies of the heart.”
At the end of the book, a chaplain tends to Billy, but Melville reminds us that chaplains are in the employ of the military not necessarily there to comfort the condemned.
Other sources
Other books were briefly consulted for their commentary of Billy Budd such as Harold Bloom’s collection of essays Interpretations and John Sutherland’s Lives of the Novelists. Interpretations ranging from the underlying homosexuality tensions between Claggart and the Handsome Sailor; Billy has a Christ figure; and Miltonian biblical references. Academics have had a field day with this novella. It served as a reminder to Murray why he never pursued a graduate degree in English.
As been our tradition, we finish with Francis’s five-star Amazon Review.
An Unlucky Tar
Billy Budd is an archetypal figure who, as an innocent young mariner, is non-violently shanghaied on to a ship of war in the early 1800s. The novella describes life among the hierarchy of male characters aboard her and the currents that determine the course of subsequent events. The reader is allowed to act as the judge of members of the crew and the extent to which any of them, and perhaps any of us, should be considered the masters of our souls or simply drifters in a sea of circumstance. Oddly, Melville based his story on a short verse he had previously composed but died with the work unfinished. Others completed it and decided to put the poem at the end in the manuscript, which serves as a touching requiem. Concise, focused and moving, the book is recommended for those wishing to explore the overt and tacit factors that drive human nature.
Tremor by Teju Cole
It is exactly this quality of perceiving truth, extracting it from irrelevant surroundings and conveying it to the reader or the viewer of a picture, which distinguishes the artist. - Barbara Tuchman (one of our favorite historians)
There are three classes of people; those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see - Leonardo DaVinci
A review in The New York Times Book Review and a comparison to one of Murray’s favorite novelists W.G. Sebald put Teju Cole’s 2023 short novel on our radar.
The narrator is Tunde a West African man working as a photography teacher at what presumbly is Harvard. Through Tunde the plot to meanders (and not necessarily in a bad way) through a number of topics such as art, appropriation of artifacts, and observations about death and the media.
For example, Tunde notes that “a lack of a good photo in the media means you are probably dead.” This longer quote fits right into the book Death Glitch which we read last year, especially when you consider how billionaires are the only ones with the means to “achieve” mortality.
Most of the human beings who have lived and died have left behind them no trace of how they looked, what their voices sounded like, how they moved, what they preferred. It is a vast oblivion but also a relief that we are not inundated with the faces and presences of the innumerable dead. We can move on with our twenty-first-century lives without having to watch videos of every eleventh-century inhabitant of Normandy or Java or Songhay. It was not until the invention and dissemination of photography that it became common for large numbers of people to have their likenesses recorded for posterity, a possibility that had previously been available only to the wealthy and powerful; and it was also only in that era as well with the invention of the gramophone that it became possible for anyone’s voice at all, no matter how eminent, to be recorded and heard after their death. The earlier privilege of remaining uncaptured, of dying with one’s death, was lost. Should the dead move around us like those who haven’t died? Should their presence be more material than those one sees in dreams? (p.52)
Certain chapters are devoted to certain topics and themes.
Chapter 5 – Is a “lecture” on painting that we are assuming Tunder is lecturing his students. Tunder compares J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying (1840) and Landscape with Burning City (1500) by Herri me de Bles.
Chapter 6 – Tunde travels to Lagos in Nigeria and this chapter are mix of short scenes or vignettes center around the people of Lagos such as missionaries, sex workers, school administrators, cloth merchants, a man who tests caskets, and a graffiti artist to name a few. Each scene is self-contained but together they are a composite of city.
Chapter 7 – The theme of chapter 6 continues but switches to the geography of Lagos itself which is a city that has an unusual set of boundaries partially determined by it’s geography. Not only is on the Atlantic Coast but there is a large lagoon that dominates the city center and Victoria Island that is connected by several large bridges.
Impressions
One of our takeaways from the discussion is that Cole’s book is one of impressions. Photographers gather impressions and the resonance of those impressions depends on light, angle, construction of the elements. Writers can be impressionistic as Cole. Plot and character development are not the meat of this book but the narrator/Cole impressions are what make this book a very worthy read.
Some quotes and comments from Francis:
Here is an example of a sort of impression which is used to justify a pre-existing belief:
Page 71: “Another ancestral truth is the way the cells in his body respond when certain music enters him. Everything he would like to say about his experience of the world is encapsulated in certain songs, not popular at the center where he lives, not known to most of the people around him.”
Here are some examples of impressionism, which, by the way, I think apply to anyone who grows up in a major metropolis, be it New York City or Lagos:
Page 77: “Swift decision-making is characteristic of the people of the city where in two seconds and with a single haughty glance the women can determine the true price of a bolt of cloth and declare it either cheap or covetable.”
Page 78: “Throughout the city this talent for accurate and rapid distinctions between flavors, colors, scents, building materials, auto parts, and musical instruments is rampant and extends even to the caskets in which they bury their dead.”
We wrap up with Francis’s Amazon review
Amazon Review: 4 stars
Does one seism fit all?
This is a story of impressions. The author shows their influence, echoing a theme expressed by Chauteaubriand (1768-1848): “As soon as a verity has once entered our mind, it gives a light which makes us see a crowd of other objects we have never perceived before.” The protagonist, a privileged, Nigerian-American photographer and teacher, approaches the creative process as Paul Klee did: “Art does not reproduce what we see, rather, it makes us see. And, in the book, it is more than just sight, as music, voices, environmental forces, and even intuitions are discussed. While the book demonstrates how such events can be virtually earth-shaking and disrupt comforting notions, the protagonist rarely further explores his or other’s responses to such impressions, sometimes overlooking his tendency toward confirmation bias. One is left wondering if every visual reminder of a tragic event requires an emotional response, if the ability of music to move listeners is truly inherited or simply learned, and the extent to which impressions may sometimes preclude a deeper understanding of human nature. Thoughtful, haunting, and provocative, the book introduces the reader to interesting places and people and eloquently echoes an aphorism of Karl Kraus (1874-1936): “Grasping the world with a glance is an art. Amazing how much fits in an eye.”
The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings by Edgar Allen Poe
We surprised ourselves by picking another 19th century American author. Like Melville, Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) was a writer we read in high school, but neither of us hadn't looked at since. We agreed to work from the list you see which included some of the standards that we vaguely remembered from our teens.
Overall we appreciated the genius of Poe. His intricate knowledge of certain topics (the dungeons of Spain, the Norwegian Coast and the streets of Paris) even though to our knowledge he never went to Norway or France. Poe suffered from many addictions gambling and alcohol and the effects of disease (he died of tuberculosis) gave him a macabre outlook on life and gave him a brand that has lived 200 years. (We have signed up for a web seminar from our alma mater Indiana University) on that topic.) Moreover, Poe writes with great detail (as does Melville and for Murray he had reread many passages to gather their meaning but one cannot help appreciating their wordsmanship. And learning new words as outré (bizarre) and phthisis (wasting away).
Francis found this passage describing Poe's process from an essay entitled The Philosophy of Composition (It is rather long, and here he also goes into great detail about writing poems, but this part gives the reader a good idea of what he is after, and it is not a search for the truth or some higher philosophical goal, but rather the technique of creating an effect). Here's an excerpt:
“I say to myself, in the first place, ‘Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?’......”Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by incident or tone—whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone—afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.”
Story by Story Quotes and Thoughts
Not only is Poe quotable, but these stories reminded us of other works that we have read here at the GRSG.
The Black Cat
“Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should n
Note the parallel with this quote from James Geary in The History of the Aphorism: “There are certain mistakes we enjoy making so much that we are always willing to repeat them.”
The Cask of the Amontillado
Revenge not seen since....Billy Budd and reminiscent of the conspiracies that we read about in Under the Eye of Power in 2023.
"I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement—a grotesque one. “You do not comprehend?” he said. “Not I,” I replied. “Then you are not of the brotherhood.” “How?” “You are not of the masons.”
The Fall of the House of Usher
Poe describing the misery of its owner:
“…with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.”
and in his death throes:
“…..that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.”
This quote reminds us of the book, The Plant Eaters, which we read last year.
(here he is describing the spooky plants that decorate the house in a manner suggesting intent:
“This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things.”
Liegia
“Why shall I pause to relate how, time after time, until near the period of the gray dawn, this hideous drama of revivification was repeated; how each terrific relapse was only into a sterner and apparently more irredeemable death; how each agony wore the aspect of a struggle with some invisible foe; and how each struggle was succeeded by I know not what of wild change in the personal appearance of the corpse?”
Similar to revivification and grave robbing that we read in Frankenstein (in 2023)and Poor Things in 2024.
The Masque of the Red Death and The Purloined Letter
Both crime stories are set in Paris with the same characters.
First there is mediocre French Police inspector, not named, but I think of him as a more serious Clouseau); here Poe gives him this attribute: “…..like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has ‘de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas.’” (To deny what exists, and to explain what doesn't.)
And then there is brilliant detective Dupin who reminds of how Sir Conan Doyle characterized Sherlock Holmes: “He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.”
Doyle owes a lot to Poe.
The Premature Burial
“As often happens, when such refusals are made, the practitioners resolved to disinter the body and dissect it at leisure, in private. Arrangements were easily effected with some of the numerous corps of body-snatchers with which London abounds; and, upon the third night after the funeral, the supposed corpse was unearthed from a grave eight feet deep, and deposited in the operating chamber of one of the private hospitals.”
“Among other things, I had the family vault so remodelled as to admit of being readily opened from within….;Besides all this, there was suspended from the roof of the tomb, a large bell, the rope of which, it was designed, should extend through a hole in the coffin, and so be fastened to one of the hands of the corpse.”
As we read about the bell and the robe in: This Republic of Suffering and while we toured a Colonial Park Cemetery in Savannah at the GRSG annual meeting we heard similar stories from our tour guide.
We wrap up with Francis’s four-star Amazon review
Raven-ings
In a somber mood, I dare try to capture the dreary depths of despair dotting the dreamscape of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories. These proceed from one tale of woe to the next, depicting dissolution of the flesh, nightmarish terrors, calculated cruelty, obsessive vengefulness, mystery and manic mayhem invariably highlighting the nuances of premortem agony. While I thrilled with trepidation at the prospect of rereading some of my favorites from childhood: The ‘Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Cask of the Amontillado’, and ‘The Fall of The House of Usher’, little did I recall the horror, madness and hideous premonitions of evil they contained. Nonetheless, I trudged on, marveling at the hauntingly familiar notes these macabre stories have since had on literature, motion pictures, and advertising ever since. Oddly, the least morbid of his works: The Purloined Letter and Murders in the Rue Morgue, pioneered the art of detective fiction and provided fertile fodder for copycats, including Arthur Conan Doyle. Recommended for anyone free of squeamishness and interested in Poe, a unique figure in American literature. His complete works, even for those left weak and weary from their perusal, provide plenty to ponder.
P.S. Poe
After finishing our discussion of the Poe short stories Francis and Murray did attend a virtual lecture on February 26th by Indiana University (our alma mater) professor Jonathan Elmer entitled Food for Thought | In Poe’s Wake: Travels in the Graphic and the Atmospheric. It was a 30-minute Zoom lecture followed by a Q & A based on Elmer’s book of the same name.
Its theme was Poe as a brand and how the author was originator of the detective short story and how he has remained relevant almost 200 years later. Two good examples are the Poe detective stories “Murder on the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter."
Francis stayed on for the Q & A. Some of the slides were good, but Francis thought that Professor Elmer should have some video clips of some of the adaptations of Poe’s work
Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog
“A well written life is almost as rare as a well lived one.” -- Thomas Carlyle 1882
A fellow bookseller first mentioned the Herzog memoir because we were both fans of Herzog’s films especially Fitzcarraldo (1982), Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) and My Best Fiend (1999). The latter is Herzog’s reflections about his tumultuous relationship with the screaming Klaus Kinski with whom he made five films.
What made Every Man an interesting read for us is that Francis was not familiar with the films, but I had seen four or five of them over the year. My fellow bookseller even loaned me his set of DVDs. So, our reactions come from two different starting points.
We both agreed that this book is entertaining, insightful (more unintentionally than Herzog trying to impart some great wisdom upon us) and somewhat haphazard. Written in 2022, Every Man is a little too long and could have used some editing. But one of the strengths of this book is Herzog’s voice. It’s the same voice you hear in My Best Fiend and in the audio version of the book which another book friend recommended as an audio book as well. (Herzog is often sought after for narration work).
Here's is a lengthy sample of Herzog's voice and demeanor and a hint of what it was like to work with Klaus Kinski:
Dauntless
Soon after Herzog was born in Munich in 1942, his mother when found his crib covered in debris after an Allied bombing and soon relocated Werner and his older brother Tilbert – to the German-Austrian hinterlands. This auspicious beginning was precursor to a Herzog's life of fearlessness. The family lived in poverty in a hovel with no running water, without adequate heat in the winter and food was scarce. They survived on the indomitable personality of the mother. Herzog writes:
“My deepest memory of my mother, burned into my brain, a moment when my brother and I were clutching at her skirts whimpering with hunger. With a sudden jolt, she freed herself, spun round, and she had a face full of an anger and despair that I have never seen before or since. She said, perfectly calmly: 'Listen, boys, if I could cut it out of my ribs, I would cut it out of my ribs, but I can’t. All right?' At that moment, we learned not to wail. The so-called culture of complaint disgusts me. (p. 30)
But the kids knew how to entertain themselves.
“Later, we children played around with carbide and made our own explosives. Setting off a detonation in a concrete pipe that ran under the road was the greatest feeling. We stood on the road above the pipe, and it felt distinctly peculiar to be lifted off our feet by a little explosion.
(Herzog’s father did not live with the family, but did have some influence on Werner intellectually.)
This extreme childhood certainly shaped him into the adventurer filmmaker that he was to become for the rest of his life beginning in his 20s. One story sticks in your mind when he was on Crete and invited to stay with a local when his host gave him the best room as is the custom. Herzog was awakened to the sense that the “something in the room was moving like champagne bubbles. In the light it turned out to be fleas, thousands of them, which I bore uncompellingly so as to not embarrass my hosts."
This illustrates two important aspects about Herzog and this memoir. The nonchalant attitude he against any challenge by nature (volcano, fire, glacier, ) or anyone whether it be the madman Klaus Kinski or corporate financiers.
In this long clip from You-Tube from My Best Fiend, you get a sense of his calmness in the face of any adversity. And his decisiveness. The excerpts shows Herzog’s ability to make up his mind quickly.
…..(Herzog, after learning of the soon to explode volcano) told him in thirty seconds what was going on in Guadeloupe and asked him if he’d commission such a film. “All right,” he said. “Off you go, but I want you back alive. The bureaucracy’s too slow; we’ll do the contract afterward.” Two hours later, I was on my way to the West Indies. P.41
Creative Process
Passages that give some sense of Herzog's creative process:
"A few years ago, I met probably the greatest living mathematician, Roger Penrose, and asked him how he proceeded, whether by abstract algebraic methods or by visualizing the problem. He told me it was entirely by visualization." - page 35 (As in Tremor —which we read earlier this year—this is important: and in our recent discussion of Poe.)
Note: Einstein echoed a similar theme to the one above "On the importance of vision: If I can't picture it, I can't understand it. " Attributed to Einstein by physicist John Archibald Wheeler in John Horgan's article "Profile: Physicist John A. Wheeler, Questioning the 'It from Bit'". Scientific American, pp. 36-37, June 1991.
….in a meeting of all the parties plus lawyers, the representatives of 20th Century Fox were very cordial to me and called me by my first name. Then the suggestion was made that for safety’s sake the film be made in a “good jungle,” i.e., the botanical gardens. I asked politely what they thought a bad jungle was, and the atmosphere instantly froze. From that moment on, I was Mr. Herzog, and I knew I was on my own. -Page 190
“to this day I can only learn from bad movies” - Page 131
“I said that if this film failed all my dreams would be at an end and I didn’t want to live as a man without dreams.” - Page 195
One can appreciate that Herzog kept creative control of his projects with small projects and a small nucleus of film crews. (His younger brother Lucki handle the finances and the rights to Herzog’s work.) Small as we’ve seen recently with 2025 Oscars the two front runners for best picture were made on relatively shoestring budgets.)
And finally, Herzog as a filmmaker is not necessarily restricted by facts. He follows the dictums of other writers. Such as:
Gustave Flaubert “Of all lies, art is the least untrue”
Rabindranath Tagore “ Truth in her dress finds facts too tight. In fiction she moves with ease. Tagore was a chronicler often mentioned in another book we read Ghosh’s book on opium Smoke and Ashes last year.
The French novelist André Gide once wrote: “I alter facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality.” Shakespeare observed similarly: “The most truthful poetry is the most feigning.”
Another aspect of his creativity is that Herzog is keen on separating the work from the creator. Herzog talks back to those would criticize him for promoting another’s work because of its merit, instead of damning it for the sins of its creator. He writes:
"My answer here consists of two more questions, though the number could be indefinitely extended. Should we remove the paintings of Caravaggio from churches and museums because he was a murderer? Do we have to reject parts of the Old Testament because Moses as a young man committed manslaughter?" - Page 269.
And in summary here is Francis' 4-star Amazon review:
A rare slice of life
When Walter Bagehot wrote: “That the greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.” he may have had in mind someone like the filmmaker Werner Herzog. Reading his memoir, which is loosely organized by theme and chronology, I found much to appreciate. The writing is lucid, and Herzog understands that the further he reaches in the past the less his recall should be considered precise. He is fascinated with extremes, in nature and of human behavior, and he obsesses over how to show them to an audience, be it through movies, music, or photography. And for ideas he never had enough time to develop, he describes them for readers perhaps in hope they will take them on. The title of his book “Every man for himself…” speaks to his lack of caution which he admits sometimes imperiled the happiness of those closest to him. However, it underestimates Herzog’s remarkable ability to recruit loyal teammates on his many projects. And the notion that God was against all is ironic, given his numerous near misses with death: severe travel-related illnesses, experimentation with pipe bombs, and encounters with mobs, arrests by corrupt regimes, ski accidents, solo glacier treks, venomous snakes, and decrepit airlines. It appears that someone, if not the Almighty, at least a guardian angel, was on his side. Although the book runs too long, readers will find it unpretentious, engaging, and a startling account of setting seemingly impossible goals that come to fruition. Recommended for those curious about this prolific filmmaker and his eventful life, and for anyone wishing to vicariously experience uncommon places, unusual circumstances, and unorthodox people.
