The Twilight World
A Novel
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“A potent, vaporous fever dream; a meditation on truth, lie, illusion, and time that floats like an aromatic haze through Herzog’s vivid reconstruction of Onoda’s war.” —The New York Times Book Review
The national bestseller by the great filmmaker Werner Herzog.
The great filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his first novel, tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War II
In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, Whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former soldier famous for having quixotically defended an island in the Philippines for decades after World War II, unaware the fighting was over. Herzog and Onoda developed an instant rapport and met many times, talking and unraveling the story of Onoda’s long war.
At the end of 1944 on Lubang Island, with Japanese troops about to withdraw, Onoda stayed behind under orders from his superior officer. For years, Onoda continued to fight his fictitious war—at first with other soldiers, and then, finally, alone, a character in a novel of his own making.
In The Twilight World, Herzog immortalizes and imagines Onoda’s years of absurd yet epic struggle in an inimitable, hypnotic style—part documentary, part poem, and part dream—that will be instantly recognizable to fans of his films. The result is a novel completely unto itself: a glowing, dancing meditation on the purpose and meaning we give our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Filmmaker Herzog (the diary Of Walking in Ice) draws on the true story of a Japanese officer who patrolled the Filipino jungle for nearly three decades after WWII, unaware the war had ended, in his fascinating debut novel. As the Imperial Army prepares to withdraw from Lubang Island in December 1944, Lt. Hiroo Onoda is ordered to remain behind and defend the territory by guerilla tactics. But after fellow officers refuse to assist him in dynamiting a port, Allied forces capture the island and decimate the remaining troops. Onoda perseveres in his mission, retreating to the mountains in the company of a young corporal. Night after night they remain on the move, preserving their bullets with coconut oil and battling deprivation by killing the odd buffalo or raiding small villages. Later, Onoda mistakes American planes en route to Korea, and later Vietnam, as proof that his war rages on. In spare prose, Herzog conveys Onoda's strange relationship to the passage of time: "After all his millions of steps," the lieutenant "understood that there was—there could be—no such thing as the present." Onoda's reemergence into a changed world in 1975 adds a captivating layer, though it's all too brief and lightly sketched. Still, Onoda shares with the director's filmic protagonists a fierce will and singular perspective. This will whet the reader's appetite for a film version.
